The pharmaceutical company has sent a pre-notification to the unions and has scheduled the first negotiation meeting for October 13. So far, it has not specified how many workers will be affected by the layoffs or the areas involved.
AstraZeneca has activated a collective redundancy process in Spain. The company has sent the pre-notification to union representatives and has set the first negotiation meeting for October 13, as reported by El Confidencial.
The company has not yet detailed how many employees will be affected by the process or which areas will be included. In internal communications, the workforce refers to it as an Expediente de Regulación de Empleo (ERE), although the pharmaceutical company has internally used the term "layoff file".
The first meeting on October 13 will mark the start of a formal negotiation period of thirty days between management and the unions. During this period, AstraZeneca will need to specify the reasons for the cut, the exact number of affected workers, and the areas that will be involved.
The Spanish subsidiary of the Swedish-British company has a workforce of around 2,000 employees. Its headquarters in Spain is located in Madrid and it has an innovation centre in Barcelona, the AstraZeneca Global Hub located in the Estel building in the Catalan capital, where nearly 1,600 employees work and where the company has planned an investment of 1.3 billion euros by next year.
This innovation centre aims to launch around twenty medications before 2030 and is driving more than 385 research projects and nearly 200 clinical trials. AstraZeneca does not have factories in Spain and outsources the production of its medications, which are manufactured at other facilities in its network or at third-party sites.
The announcement comes after a year of growth for the group. In 2025, it increased its profits by more than 45% and approached 8.6 billion euros in net profit. Revenue from the oncology division grew by 15% to 21.523 billion euros, contributing to total revenues that rose by nearly 9% to 49.347 billion euros.
The other divisions also improved. The biotechnology area increased sales by 5% to 19.318 billion euros, while the rare diseases division rose by 4% to 9.126 billion euros.
In Spain, revenue increased by 15% to exceed 910 million euros, but higher costs cut profit by 17% to 26 million euros. With these results, the pharmaceutical's global forecasts included revenue growth of up to 9% this year and an increase in earnings per share of over 10%.
The company, founded in 1999 after the merger of the Swedish laboratory Astra and the British Zeneca Group, rejected an offer of around 81 billion euros to merge its business with Pfizer more than a decade ago. Last summer, its shares fell by more than 8% on the London Stock Exchange after announcing that a study on Wainua, a drug for cardiovascular conditions, had not met sufficient efficacy criteria, and they recorded a similar drop when news broke of negotiations to combine businesses with the American laboratory Bristol Myers Squibb.
The timeline of the ERE is now in the hands of the negotiating table: the first meeting will be on October 13, and from there, the company and unions will have thirty days to reach an agreement on the extent of the cuts.
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