Quintiles is laying off workers again. The Durham, North Carolina-based clinical research organization is laying off workers in a "small employee action," according to LocalTechWire.
Quintiles, a privately held company, isn’t disclosing how many workers were affected, nor will it say where the cuts were made. Quintiles also didn’t say much last May when the company confirmed layoffs throughout the company.
Quintiles is the industry’s largest CRO with annual revenue topping $3 billion and more than 20,000 workers employed wordwide.
These layoffs shouldn’t set off any alarm bells. Quintiles does have job postings listed in several markets, including North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park region, and CROs are constantly ramping up and scaling down their workforces depending on the contracts they sign with pharmaceutical companies.
In 2008, Raleigh-based CRO INC Research announced cuts amounting to 3 percent of its North American workforce. PPD, another North Carolina-based CRO, laid off 270 in 2009. Like INC, those cuts were also confined to the North American operations.
Outsourcing is a way for the pharma industry to trim expenses but even the companies doing the outsourced work need to cut costs. INC and PPD made cuts in North America because it costs them less to do clinical research work overseas. Quintiles may be the largest CRO, but it’s not immune to those same industry pressures.
