Beckman Instruments Plans to Eliminate 150 Positions
Citing a worldwide slump in government spending on medical research programs, Beckman Instruments said Thursday it will eliminate about 150 positions, or 2% of its 7,400 jobs, by the end of the year.
All the cuts will be in the company’s bioanalytical group, which produces esoteric instruments used largely in university and government medical and biological research programs. In addition, the approximately 2,850 remaining employees of the group will be required to take five days of vacation or unpaid furlough by year’s end.
Beckman, based in Fullerton, has facilities throughout Europe and Asia as well as in the United States. The job cuts “will be spread around all our facilities and will be across the board, including salaried and hourly people,” spokeswoman Elke Eastman said. About 2,400 employees work in Orange County, but Eastman was unable to say how many of them work in the bioanalytical group.
She said that some of the jobs will be eliminated through normal attrition but that most will be trimmed in layoffs.
Jay Steffenhagen, director of investor relations for Beckman, said the bioanalytical group is expected to show a drop in sales this year. Traditionally, the group accounts for about half of Beckman’s total revenue.
The company reported sales of $770 million for 1988 and earnings of $42.5 million. For the first six months of 1989, the company reported sales of $399.5 million, up 5% from a year earliers, and unchanged earnings of $22.1 million.
Beckman’s diagnostic instruments group, however, has posted strong sales growth this year, Steffenhagen said, and as a result the company’s total sales “will show modest growth.”
In a prepared statement Friday, Louis T. Rosso, Beckman’s chairman and president, said the conditions affecting the company’s bioanalytical group reflect “a worldwide phenomenon.”
Steffenhagen said Beckman has tracked significant declines in government grants to biomedical research programs in the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, China and West Germany in the past year.
Mary Yost, an Atlanta-based health supplies industry analyst with Interstate/Johnson Lane, said a variety of factors, including currency fluctuations and the soaring cost of medical care, have caused many governments to trim spending on health research as they struggle to balance their budgets.
