Pfizer is culling hundreds of sales reps in the United States as the company shifts into digital drive as the pandemic pushed away in-person meetings.
Pfizer and partner BioNTech are set to make around $40 billion in COVID vaccines sales for the year and more in 2022, with new antiviral Paxlovid also set to help bring in yet more billions in the future.
But whilst flush with cash, this doesn’t mean the New York-based Big Pharma will be spending money where it isn’t needed.
Pfizer said in a statement to Reuters that: “We are evolving into a more focused and innovative biopharma company, and evolving the way we engage with healthcare professionals in an increasingly digital world.
“There will be some changes to our workforce to ensure we have the right expertise and resources in place to meet our evolving needs.”
Fierce Pharma Marketing is awaiting confirmation from Pfizer about the cuts, but Reuters, quoting an anonymous source familiar with the matter said Pfizer was “eliminating a few hundred” sales positions.
The newswire, quoting a document it had seen, adds that Pfizer believes that doctors and other healthcare professionals “will want around half of their interactions with drug companies to be remote in the future,” and thus won’t need the same sized sales field force.
This comes in the same week that Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla spoke at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference 2022 about its move to virtual. “Part of our development efforts in COVID were very successful because of the digitization that we’ve had in our operation and that also will continue play,” he said.
He added that the go-to-market approach is “very different,” given the way that the company and doctors can have access to information about the medicines “through the digital route rather than through field forces,” which is the way it used to control that information.
