Bristol Myers charts 500-plus new layoffs in New Jersey following expanded cost-savings drive

After revealing in February plans to save $2 billion more on top of a previously disclosed cost-cutting initiative, Bristol Myers Squibb is conducting another round of job cuts in the Garden State.

BMS is laying off 516 workers who report to the company in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, according to a new Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) report filed (PDF) with the state.

The move is part of a broader cost-cutting initiative designed to save $2 billion by the end of 2027. BMS unveiled the plan in February, and it comes on top of a separate $1.5 billion savings initiative the drugmaker laid out last April, which itself is targeting more than 2,000 layoffs.

Through the latest layoffs, BMS aims to continue “aligning resources to best support our operating model and our portfolio evolution,” a company spokesperson told Fierce Pharma over email.

“With respect to the 2025 expansion, we expect to realize approximately $2 billion in annual cost savings by the end of 2027, and we remain on track to deliver $1 billion of these savings by the end of this year,” the spokesperson said.

“Unfortunately, there were impacts to some of our employees as a result of these changes,” she added, noting that BMS is grateful for the work of its colleagues and plans to help affected employees throughout the transition process.

BMS did not comment on the types of roles being affected. In Lawrenceville, the company hosts both its local corporate headquarters plus a separate commercial facility that also houses employees from BMS' relevant R&D and global product development and supply teams.

The cuts aren’t the first for BMS’ Lawrenceville team this year. Back in March, the company disclosed that it was separately cutting more than 200 jobs in the community, which is situated roughly halfway between Princeton and Trenton. Around the same time, BMS also revealed plans to lay off 57 workers at its site in Redwood City, California.

The Redwood City site is focused on research into the “complexities of the tumor microenvironment,” according to the pharma's website.

BMS is just one of many large pharma companies that have resorted to cost-savings and downsizing initiatives in recent years, following in the footsteps of drugmakers like Novartis, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, among others.

In February, the company said it planned to slash $2 billion in costs by the end of 2027, adding on to a separate $1.5 billion cost-savings drive that kicked off last spring. At the time, BMS said the project would lead to more layoffs, though the company declined to say how many and where.

Still, BMS is hardly hurting for cash, as evinced by the company’s $23 billion M&A spending spree in 2023, which allowed it to acquire Karuna Therapeutics, Mirati Therapeutics and RayzeBio.

Elsewhere, BMS last week confirmed plans to stop producing viral vectors for its cell therapy portfolio at a site in Libertyville, Illinois, which the company picked up from Novartis in early 2023.

The decision will see the pharma pivot its vector work from the Libertyville site to another BMS plant in Devens, Massachusetts. The move has impacted “some of our employees,” a spokesperson said last week, without disclosing specific layoff numbers.