Boehringer Ingelheim is hiring again

The chairman of Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH confirmed the company culled 800 jobs from its U.S. sales force last year, but the pharmaceutical giant appears to be hiring again despite the expiration of a patent protecting a blockbuster drug.

Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc. is one of the five largest corporate employers in Fairfield County with just over 3,000 employees at its U.S. headquarters in Ridgefield as of 2008, according to a town planning document published this year cited by the Ridgefield Press.

Since late last summer, Boehringer Ingelheim has cut some 800 jobs in its U.S. sales force, according to company chairman Andreas Barner, who disclosed the cuts to the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

The online trade publication PharmaGossip.com reported the job cuts last August, with estimates at the time ranging from 600 to 950 jobs. Until now, however, senior Boehringer Ingelheim executives had remained mum on the cuts. At deadline, company spokeswoman Amy Kunkel had yet to respond to multiple requests for the extent of any cuts that may have occurred at the company”™s Ridgefield facility.

Besides Ridgefield, Boehringer Ingelheim has major sites in St. Louis; Petersburg, Va.; and two big Ohio facilities in Columbus and Bedford outside Cleveland. As is the case in Connecticut, employers are required to formally notify officials of any mass layoffs under Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act laws in effect in those states.

 

If the company”™s current sales jobs openings are any indication, however, much of its sales force appears to be spread across some 100 smaller offices in 35 states. Those “clinical science consultants,” as the company terms its sales force, are generally assigned to account loads of 125 physicians each within relatively small sales territories.

 

Boehringer Ingelheim was not alone in slashing sales jobs. Due in part to the mega-mergers between Pfizer and Wyeth, and Merck and Schering Plough, the pharmaceutical industry totaled the highest number of layoffs in the first two months of 2010 of a half-dozen industries studied by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The deals impacted operations throughout New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.

For those looking for happy pills, the industry”™s layoffs nevertheless reached their lowest level in February since June 2006, the Chicago-based outplacement firm added.

For its part, Boehringer Ingelheim opened 2009 by announcing a pair of $150 million upgrades in Virginia and Missouri, on the heels of a sustained expansion in Ridgefield the previous few years.

And despite the job cuts disclosed by Barner, the company is still hiring for new openings, including in Ridgefield where it currently lists more than 80 open positions, some dating back to last December.

At the same time, Boehringer Ingelheim will see competition for its Flomax drug for men with urinary problems stemming from an enlarged prostate, following the expiration of its patent on the technology. This month, the Food & Drug Administration approved Impax Laboratories Inc.”™s petition to begin selling a generic version of the drug, and the Hayward, Calif.-based company announced it would begin shipments immediately.

Flomax capsules generated $2.1 billion in U.S. sales in 2009, according to Wolters Kluwer Health.

Drug companies are under federal scrutiny for the so-called practice of “pay for delay,” in which they compensate generic drug makers for delaying the production of drugs freed from patents. Last October, the Federal Trade Commission asked a judge for a subpoena to enforce an information request it made of Boehringer Ingelheim as part of its investigation.

As part of his proposed overhaul of the U.S. health system, President Obama has called for an outright ban on such practices.