Agilent Technologies, a Santa Clara-based company known best for its laboratory equipment, is laying off 184 workers in California.
The biotech giant announced the layoffs in a WARN filing with California on Friday, as required by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act in the event of mass layoffs. Per the WARN, Agilent is cutting 156 workers from its Santa Clara headquarters, 11 in La Jolla, seven in Carpinteria, six in San Diego and four in Folsom.
Agilent launched notifying employees about the layoffs around May 23 and continued until around June 6, per the WARN. The cuts, the document declares, include workers in sales, engineering, management, human resources, IT, marketing and more. Forty of the employees had “R&D” in their job titles, and 15 had “scientist.” The layoffs launch Aug. 9 and will be permanent, the WARN stated.
Sarah Litton, a spokesperson for Agilent, notified SFGATE that the California cuts are part of a 3% layoff “across operations and regions.” She stated the purpose is to “adjust to the pace of recovery in the market” and that Agilent would reinvest in biopharma, a group of chemicals known as PFAS and lab technology. The company isn’t planning any more layoffs, Litton stated.
Agilent sells a laundry list of laboratory products, including various chromatography devices and tools for cell analysis and mass spectrometest. The company, which reported having 18,100 employees as of October 2023, announced 400 layoffs in December, as well as some office closures.
In Agilent’s most recent earnings report, filed in late May, the company stated its revenue had fallen 8.4% year-over-year, but it still turned a $308 million profit from February through April. CEO Padraig McDonnell wrote, “While we see the market improving, it is improving at a slower pace than anticipated.”
When Agilent went public in 1999, after spinning off from Hewlett-Packard, its initial public offering was one of the most valuable to date. As of Tuesday, the company was worth around $38.5 billion on the stock market.
Hear of anything happening at Agilent Technologies or another Bay Area tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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