Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk is shutting down one of its insulin-producing facilities in the Zealand town of Kalundborg, a move that will result in 330 positions being eliminated, reported public broadcaster DR.
According to the company, 100 employees will be laid off and other 230 are expected to be relocated.
‘We expect to be able to employ all of those 230 workers elsewhere in the company,’ said Mike Rulis, Novo Nordisk’s head of communications.Rulis would, however, not guarantee that those employees would be relocated in Kalundborg, where Novo Nordisk has several other plants.
Novo Nordisk decided to close the plant because its locations in Brazil, France and the US can already produce enough insulin for the company’s purposes. The company has grown dramatically over the past ten years, but most of the new jobs have been located abroad.
‘Production costs are lower abroad and those locations also help get us into strategically important markets,’ said Rulis.
Novo Nordisk is currently working on establishing a new plant in China.
‘We’ll still have jobs in Denmark in the future,’ stressed Rulis. ‘We consider Denmark the company's laboratory, and it’s here we develop new products. But we’re increasingly moving production abroad.’
Novo Nordisk has 5600 production employees in Denmark, with 2100 of them working in Kalundborg.
