Three months after completing its $13 billion acquisition of Nycomed, Takeda Pharmaceuticals now plans to cut roughly 10 percent of its workforce, or 2,800 jobs - about 2,100 from Europe and 700 from the US - by 2016 in order to save approximately $2.6 billion. The reorganization will include closing an unspecified number of sites and merging or shuttering various subsidiaries.

The cuts will stretch across commercial, research and administrative operations, although most of the moves are planned for Germany, where unions representing Takeda employees reportedly called the plan a “huge mistake.” Unions representing employees at Novartis succeeded in pressuring the drugmaker to reverse plans to close a Swiss plant, although tax breaks also helped (see this).

“While our combined operations in more than 70 countries are more complementary than overlapping, there are a number of areas where we will need to make changes to ensure efficient and flexible operations moving forward,” Takeda ceo and president Yasuchika Hasegawa says in a statement. The Japanese drugmaker currently employs close to 30,000 people worldwide.

In announcing the cutbacks, Takeda becomes the latest drugmaker to disclose plans to eliminate a hefty number of jobs. In recent months, Novartis, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, Teva Pharmaceuticals and Amgen all announced their payrolls would be reduced significantly in the face of patent expirations on key-selling meds, struggles to replenish their pipelines and consolidations following acquisitions.

In all, roughly 8,000 jobs in the pharmaceutical industry are disappearing as a result of these actions, and this figure does not include smaller clusters of workers let go (read this), often by smaller companies. In some cases, the cuts reflect ongoing plans to eliminate expenses. A key example would include Merck, which last summer annnounced another 12,000 to 13,000 jobs would be axed (read here).

Ironically, the recent spate of job cuts followed a lull that as recently as last August suggested to some that the pace of industry layoffs might be finally be slowing, following a protracted and difficult bloodletting over the past few years (read this and this).

This is not the first time, by the way, that Takeda has slashed a large chunk of its payroll. Nearly two years ago, the drugmaker eliminated about 1,400 US jobs in response to declining sales and looming generic competition for its Actos diabetes drug (read here).

axe pic thx to brittgow on flickr