500 taking Pfizer transfers; Others look elsewhere or start own companies
BYLINE: Bill Shea
Drug giant Pfizer Inc. has offered job transfers to about 1,000 of the 2,100 employees at its sprawling Ann Arbor facility slated for closure next year, and about 500 have accepted, a company spokesman said.
The other 500 are in the process of considering the offer or have rejected it, said Rick Chambers, Pfizer's director of corporate media relations.
Local officials, including Ann Arbor Mayor John Hieftje, had said publicly that New York-based Pfizer intended to transfer 70 percent of its Ann Arbor workforce. Chambers said he's unsure of where that number came from.
The number of those accepting transfers meets expectations, he said.
``The results thus far are pretty much in line with our previous experience in making transfer offers,'' Chambers said, citing Pfizer facility closures in recent years in Kalamazoo and Skokie, Ill.
``It is a bit of a victory that the number is as low as it is for the number that have accepted (transfers),'' said Michael Finney, chairman and CEO of regional economic-development group Ann Arbor Spark.
Spark has led a comprehensive effort to retain as many of Pfizer's workers as possible by setting up training for those interested in startups and connecting them to sources of funding and space. The University of Michigan also is targeting Pfizer staff for teaching and research positions.
Finney said Spark has had 200 Southeast Michigan companies contact it and post 600 job openings, and 27 groups of Pfizer employees are interested in forming companies. He said those who choose to forgo Pfizer's offer, or are let go, still could be snatched up by other out-of-state drug companies looking for talent.
``We view the outside world as a much bigger competitor than Pfizer,'' he said.
Mark Creswell isn't surprised more people aren't staying with Pfizer. He spent nearly 20 years with Pfizer and its predecessor in Ann Arbor, Warner-Lambert. He left the company April 1 to start International Discovery Sourcing Consultants L.L.C. in Chelsea, a drug-discovery project-management and outsourcing firm.
``A lot of former Pfizer employees have contacted me. These are tremendously talented folks that want to stay in the area,'' he said, adding that he plans to hire eight to 11 employees and expects most of them to be ex-Pfizer staffers.
Pfizer announced Jan. 22 it will close its 2 million-square-foot, 177-acre research campus on Plymouth Road by the end of 2008. The closure is part of the company's global cost-cutting and restructuring effort that's expected to reduce Pfizer's total workforce by 10,000 and save the drug maker $2 billion annually. The company faces a major revenue loss with expiration of the patent in 2011 of cholesterol drug Lipitor, which accounts for about 20 percent of Pfizer's revenue, and there's nothing of that caliber in its drug pipeline, Chambers said.
Most of the Ann Arbor transfers will be to Pfizer's operations in Groton, Conn., Chambers said, with smaller numbers going to La Jolla, Calif.; St. Louis; and Sandwich, England.
Some of those offered transfers are employees who transferred to Ann Arbor after Pfizer acquired Pharmacia Corp. in 2003 and downsized operations in Kalamazoo. Chambers said the company hadn't tracked how many employees now headed for other sites are former Kalamazoo transfers.
Those not offered transfers are being recruited for open positions elsewhere in the company, Chambers said. Those offered transfers were identified by the individual departments, or lines, Chambers said. There was no central decision maker.
Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, has begun transferring employees every few weeks in batches of 50 to 150, Chambers said. About 400 will be left by the end of the year, and they will be phased out as the facility shuts down over 2008. The company is ending its discovery research in dermatology, but all the other research and development in Ann Arbor will be moved elsewhere, Chambers said.
Esperion Therapeutics, a cholesterol drug research subsidiary of Pfizer in Plymouth, was closed May 11. Sixty jobs were lost or transferred to Groton and the research done by the Esperion unit has been absorbed within other units.
Pfizer acquired Esperion in 2004 for $1.3 billion.
After the Ann Arbor campus is closed, Pfizer still will have 4,000 employees in Michigan, almost all in Kalamazoo. The company's Michigan operations will focus on drug manufacturing, veterinary-medicine research and development, sales and support groups.
In other Pfizer developments, the company:
* Plans to soon hire a national broker to handle the sale of the Ann Arbor property, which the city said has an assessed value of $266.7 million and market value of more than $530 million.
* Is turning some of its empty lab and office space in La Jolla, Calif., into an incubator for biotech startups. Chambers said there are no plans to do anything similar in Michigan.
* Recently gave Michigan State University a $50 million laboratory in Holland, idle since 2003, that will be used as a biotech research facility.
Bill Shea: (313) 446-1626, bshea@ crain.com