Silvia Pieraccini
FLORENCE
The road has been taken, and it seems difficult for Menarini to go back: the leading national pharmaceutical company, 3,027 million in consolidated revenues in 2011 (66.7% abroad) and 16,000 employees, 3,200 of whom in Italy, is preparing to review the production strategies in our country, which today hosts the most important manufacturing pole of the group (five plants between Tuscany, Lombardy and Abruzzo) together with Germany (where it owns the Berlin-Chemie company).
The scenario that is emerging is the dismissal of a thousand employees (office workers, workers, scientific representatives, largely concentrated in Tuscany), already announced in recent months (see Il Sole 24 Ore of 14 October 2012) and frozen, due to the second time at the request of the institutions, until the end of January and the beginning of next February.
The reason is linked to the rule introduced by the spending review maneuver, which forced doctors to indicate the active ingredient of the medicine in the recipe, thus favoring the use of generic drugs; and relegated the indication of the branded drug, which is binding for the pharmacist, only to cases where adequate justification is included in the prescription. The regulation, explains the general manager of Menarini Domenico Simone, has already led to a substantial loss of turnover for the Florentine family group headed by the Aleotti family: -25% of revenues achieved in Italy in the August-November period, i.e. since the the disputed regulation is in force, only partially modified by law 221/2012 of 17 December last.
It is the clear demonstration - underlines Simone - that the law is transferring, by law, shares of turnover from pharmaceutical companies that invest in research and development, employ thousands of people and export a large part of the turnover, to companies producing generics, which do not no investment in research and, in Italy, they employ just 830 people». "And all this without any benefit to the state coffers," hisses the director general. Which foresees a scenario destined only to get worse: «The prospect is to move towards a drastic reduction in the turnover that Menarini achieves in Italy. And if we lose the national market, it becomes uneconomical to continue producing here». For this reason, the pharmaceutical group intends to confirm the thousand redundancies.
