The announcement on Tuesday of the closure of the Geneva office of the biotechnology company Merck Serono, which employs 1,250 people, caused a wave of astonishment in Switzerland. The press does not hesitate to speak of "Black Tuesday".
The closure will take place by the summer of 2013, indicated the chemical-pharmaceutical group Merck KGaA, owner of the Genevan company. Five hundred jobs will be canceled and another 750 will be transferred elsewhere. To these must be added another 80 abolished jobs in the canton of Vaud.
The administrative activities in Geneva will be concentrated in Darmstadt, Germany, while part of the research and development activities will be transferred to the offices in Boston and Beijing.
This is to "optimally benefit from the scientific expertise of the biotechnological center in the American metropolis and to ensure a leading development in the growing markets", indicated the multinational.
The renovation had the effect of a bomb. 24 Heures does not hesitate to speak of a "tsunami on the banks of Lake Geneva", while several other newspapers underline that it is a "black day" for Switzerland. Indeed, Le Temps points out that it is the "largest collective redundancy ever in French-speaking Switzerland".
Brutal cut
"For the Geneva economic location, this is a painful loss and a sign that in the western cantons of Switzerland the years of fat cows perhaps belong to the past", writes the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, recalling the massive arrival of multinationals in the region that has characterized the last decade.
Bad news concerning Merck Serono was expected, notes the Basler Zeitung. “However, no one had foreseen a closure.”
"Never in the history of the canton, even during the darkest years of industrial decline - adds the editorialist of the Tribune de Genève - had the region suffered such a brutal and massive cut".
For the Geneva-based newspaper, it is difficult to accept that a company that has recorded 745 million profits "liquidates more than a thousand collaborators without warning and without moods".
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