Dive Brief:
- Hologic will lay off 86 people in Connecticut across late 2024 and early 2025 as part of a plant closure, the company said in a Friday notice.
- The company plans to lay off 71 people in December, but a skeleton crew will continue until February to handle final post-closure activities at the Danbury site, which makes breast health products.
- Hologic committed to closing the facility in late 2021 and gave most employees the option to relocate to other sites.
Dive Insight:
Hologic is transferring the production of equipment currently made in Danbury, as well as all support services provided from the Connecticut facility, to a site in Newark, Delaware. The company has already relocated Danbury’s R&D, sales and services support and administrative functions to the Newark site and a facility in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
Hologic said it expected to lay off 111 employees in its 2023 annual report. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification notice filed last week covers 86 people. Most of the employees will leave the company in December. Hologic will lay off a further three employees at the end of January and part ways with the remaining 12 staffers in February.
The actions will see Hologic exit a facility that is nearing the end of its lease. Hologic’s lease on the breast health manufacturing facility expires in 2026. The lease on another Danbury site, which housed R&D and manufacturing operations, ended in 2023.
Hologic estimated in July that total severance charges, including retention, will be around $7.5 million. The company reported a $47.1 million increase in inventory in its fiscal third quarter that was partly related to the build of breast health capital equipment prior to the transfer of manufacturing from Danbury to Newark.
The closure follows the shuttering of European facilities that resulted in 190 Hologic workers losing their jobs. Weeks after disclosing plans to close international facilities, Hologic Chief Financial Officer Karleen Oberton told The Wall Street Journal the company “collectively had a philosophy that mass layoffs are a failure of leadership.”
Hologic, which sold a COVID-19 test, grew its headcount during the pandemic, going from around 5,800 employees in September 2020 to almost 6,700 staffers one year later. Demand for COVID-19 testing has since collapsed, but Hologic has maintained its headcount so far, reporting close to 7,000 employees in its annual filings for 2022 and 2023.