Risk to AstraZeneca back office as 8,000 job cuts announced
IT staff not ruled out as company prepares for big cull
By Anh Nguyen | Computerworld UK | Published 11:15, 29 January 10
Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is cutting another 8,000 jobs worldwide over the next four years, prompting concerns among back office staff.
The cuts, revealed in AstraZeneca's full-year results for 2009, are on top of the 15,000 redundancies that it announced last January, due to be completed by 2013.
AstraZeneca currently employs around 11,000 people in the UK.
A spokesman for AstraZeneca did not rule out IT staff being affected. The new job cuts will affect all departments, including research and development, sales and marketing, and administration and operations.
It is not known how many of the roles will be outsourced. Historically, the company has outsourced a significant amount of its IT. In December 2008, it signed a multi-million pound contract with Infosys to support manufacturing, supply chain, finance, human resources and other applications.
AstraZeneca also signed a £832 million deal with IBM in 2007 to provide email, hosting, networking, PC management, server, storage and service management support.
Meanwhile in March 2008, AstraZeneca signed a £47 million outsourcing deal with Cognizant for centralised data management services.
