Grifols, the blood products multinational, announced today to the CNMV a plan to adjust costs and improve efficiency that plans to save 400 million euros by 2024, and includes a reduction in the workforce of 2,300 people, a hundred of them in Spain.
The firm, which has been led by the American Steven Mayer since last October, as executive president, has explained that the plan includes measures to achieve the optimization of costs and plasma operations, the rationalization of corporate functions and other improvements in efficiency in the organization. The adjustment will increase profits by around 100 million euros this year, and will reach its full impact in the 2024 accounts.
The firm plans to reduce the costs associated with the collection of plasma by around 300 million euros in relation to the 2022 financial year. To this end, it plans to “create a more efficient and modern plasma collection platform”, which will allow it to reduce the workforce in the area of plasma in the United States in approximately 2,000 jobs in 2023.
The firm also plans to lighten its corporate structure, with centralization and automation of work flows, the implementation of shared services in the business areas, the consolidation of suppliers, the simplification of reporting structures and the elimination of duplicate functions and positions, among other. These initiatives will affect close to 300 people, most of them in the United States and approximately a third in Spain.
The company estimates that the adjustment will cost it 140 million euros, mainly in severance pay, and advisory and consultancy fees, which it will charge to its accounts for the first quarter of 2023.
The Catalan group saw its business greatly affected by the pandemic in 2021 and early 2022, because it reduced plasma donations in its main market, the United States. Donations have already recovered the levels prior to the pandemic, so that until September it obtained income of 4,351 million euros, with an increase of 18.8% in terms reported in relation to a year earlier.
However, the benefits have not been recovered in the same way. Grifols earned 188 million euros in the first nine months of the year, 30% less than in the same period of 2021, due to the increase in financial expenses related to the acquisition of Biotest and an increase in personnel and payments to donors in the United States.
