Less than a week after Novartis unveiled a plan to establish a “flagship manufacturing hub” in North Carolina that would add 700 employees to its rolls, the Swiss drugmaker says it is making moves in its home country that will eliminate 550 jobs at one site and add 80 at another.
At its manufacturing complex in Stein in northern Switzerland, Novartis will invest $26 million to conduct an automation overhaul, which will boost its productivity, according to the company. Along with the plan, Novartis will scrap the production and packaging of tablets and capsules at the Stein site by the end of 2027, which will reduce its head count by 550.
Last week, as part of its effort to bolster its production capabilities in North Carolina, Novartis said it would build a plant in Morrisville that would specialize in manufacturing tablets and capsules and handling their packaging.
Novartis also said Tuesday that it will invest $80 million in its Schweizerhalle facility to bolster siRNA manufacturing. The outlay will create about 80 new jobs at the site by the end of 2028, the company said.
“To maintain competitive production in Switzerland, we must focus on investing in innovative manufacturing technologies and a high degree of automation,” Steffen Lang, Novartis’ president of operations, said in a release. “With the planned adjustments, we are further developing both sites, Schweizerhalle and Stein, as centers of excellence for innovative production.”
The company did not respond immediately to a request for information about whether its moves in the U.S. and Switzerland are linked.
Last week, in addition to its plan for the Morrisville facility, Novartis said it would build two new sites near its gene therapy manufacturing plant in Durham, North Carolina. The facilities will specialize in biologics production and sterile packaging, the company said, and are expected to come online in the 2027-28 time frame.
The new investment in North Carolina totals $771 million and would allow for end-to-end production of its key medicines in the U.S., Novartis said. The outlay is part of the company’s commitment to spend $23 billion to expand its facilities in the U.S. over the next five years.
With that pledge, made in April, Novartis joined several other drugmakers that have unveiled major U.S. investment plans aimed at exempting them from tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump.