Schwarz to slash staff in Ireland

Local press reports in Ireland have suggested that Germany's Schwarz Pharma is planning to scale back its operations in Shannon and cut its workforce. The company is allegedly planning to reduce its Irish workforce by 70 to around 180 staff.

Schwarz' activities in Shannon centre on its SIFA Ltd subsidiary, which operates a plant manufacturing active pharmaceutical ingredients and solid dosage forms. The unit's traditional focus has been on the manufacture of nitrates, such as isosorbide-5-mononitrate and isosorbide dinitrate, which are sold worldwide as cardiovascular medicines. SIFA also has a state-of-the-art licensed pharmaceutical manufacturing facility specialising in tabletting, capsule filling and slow-release pellet production.

Schwarz said it is shifting some of its operations to Germany, where it has excess capacity in its plants.

The company's decision comes at a time when Schwarz is forecasting a two-fold increase in earnings for 2003 on the back of the approval in the USA of a generic version of AstraZeneca's multibillion dollar-selling ulcer drug Prilosec (omeprazole) towards the end of last year. The significance of this approval, awarded to Schwarz' US KUDCo subsidiary, can be seen in the fact that the group's sales rose just 5.5 per cent in the first half of 2002 but a whopping 26 per cent by the end of the year.

However, the initial bonanza afforded by being the first marketer of generic omeprazole will likely be curtailed once KUDCo's exclusivity for its version comes to an end and rival generics flood the market. The launch of KUDCo's generic was made possible by the ruling in October of last year that the version did not infringe US patents held by AstraZeneca, as well as the relinquishing of market exclusivity for generic omeprazole, under the first-to-file rules, by Merck KGaA's Canadian generics unit Genpharm and Andrx of the USA.