Takeda announces more job cuts, bringing total layoffs in Massachusetts to 940 by next year

The Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, on Monday, Oct. 31, 2022.Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

For the third time in five months, Takeda Pharmaceutical says it is laying off employees in Massachusetts, raising the total number of workers who will be shed this year and next year to 940.

Takeda, the largest pharmaceutical company by headcount in Massachusetts, with more than 5,700 employees, notified the state Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development on Friday that it began laying off 79 employees in September. The total includes 45 at Takeda’s Cambridge sites and 34 at its Lexington sites. The layoffs could last through March.

The latest round of layoffs was the smallest of three job-cutting waves disclosed this year by Takeda, which is based in Tokyo and has its US headquarters in Cambridge. In May, the company said it was laying off 641 employees in the state, including 495 in Cambridge and 146 in Lexington. A month later, the company said it planned to cut 189 more jobs in Cambridge as well as 31 in Lexington.

“Takeda is the largest life sciences employer in Massachusetts, and we are confident that we will remain the largest,” the company said in a statement on Monday.

Takeda is hardly the only large pharmaceutical company making layoffs this year. Major companies such as Bristol Myers Squibb, Bayer, and Pfizer have been cutting jobs as they grapple with financial challenges and changing markets.

At Takeda, the layoffs stem from a restructuring plan announced on May 9 by the drug maker’s chief executive, Christophe Weber, who said the company needed “rigorous prioritization, efficiencies, and organizational agility.”

Weber acted after annual profits fell by more than half following the loss of patent protection for several major drugs, including, in the United States, the company’s blockbuster medicine Vyvanse for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. The medicine now faces competition from multiple cheaper generics.

Takeda has also lost patent protection on its blood pressure medicine Azilva in Japan. Takeda has said it won’t face competition from generic versions of its other drugs until the early 2030s.

Takeda has also recently shelved at least half a dozen experimental cancer medicines because of disappointing clinical trial results or to focus on more promising late-stage drug candidates for a variety of diseases.

The company has estimated it would incur about $900 million in costs while it reorganized and trimmed its drug pipeline.

The Japanese drug maker has more than 50,000 employees worldwide. The company said Monday that it couldn’t specify how many employees might be laid off outside the United States because “the changes being made will look different across Takeda and will be phased according to unique business needs and country requirements.”

In Massachusetts, the layoffs have resulted in the loss of a $1.87 million tax break from Governor Maura Healey’s administration and the quasi-public Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. In May of last year, Takeda pledged to create 125 jobs in Lexington in exchange for the tax break.

However, the state canceled the award in February after the company told state officials that it wouldn’t be able to fulfill the pledge, according to Joseph Sullivan, a spokesperson for the Life Sciences Center.