ANOTHER round of redundancies is looming over Wee County and Stirling workers at a global health diagnostics company.
Insiders say LumiraDx, a global company which has sites in Tullibody and near Stirling, has announced 450 redundancies which will have an impact in the area.
The company, which let more than 60 people go in the Wee County in an announcement just before Christmas, is yet to confirm the number of redundancies in the area.
An insider told the Advertiser the latest round of redundancies was announced on Good Friday, April 7, by US-based chief finance officer Dorian LeBlanc.
They said: “The company in the last 12 months has went through two rounds of redundancies, impacting the local community, the recent redundancies happened in January and February of this year.
“Now yet again, the company [executive] team have made yet another decision to cut into the staffing levels, reducing the 1,000 workforce down to 550.
“This will have significant impact to the local area – staff at Manor Loan and Dumyat will be impacted by this latest news.”
LumiraDx, which expanded heavily during the pandemic to manufacture Covid-19 testing kits, has sites at Dumyat Business Park in Tullibody and at Manor Farm Business Park in Stirling.
On April 6, it told investors it will take forward its Strategic Refocus and Cost Restructuring Program “aimed at reducing its scale and operations to pre-pandemic levels and to further evolve LumiraDx into an agile organization with a clear focus on the areas with the greatest potential”.
As part of cost restructuring, it said it would further reduce its global workforce by around 40 per cent.
A company spokesperson told the Advertiser: “The work force reduction is global and spread across all functions and brings us back to pre-pandemic levels.
“The exact number in the UK has not yet been determined as we have to follow applicable processes.
“As many other companies in the industry, the current economic and finance environment required us to make tough choices and the work force reduction was one of them.
“We have committed to communicating with our employees throughout this process and to providing support and resources to help you navigate these changes.”
LumiraDx brands itself as a “next-generation point of care diagnostics company that is transforming community-based healthcare”.
During the last round of redundancies, it told the Advertiser that the market for Covid-19 tests “has been volatile and remains uncertain”.
However, it said it was working to expand its capabilities “well beyond Covid-19 testing” with a number of new assays covering diabetes, respiratory, and cardiovascular issues which recently began rolling out commercially.
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