Category — Employment and People

Thomas Rossnagel - former head of Sunrise’s Europe business and operations has been promoted to President and CEO of Sunrise Medical. Michael N. Cannizzaro - former CEO will continue as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Rossnagel who worked out of the companies German operations is recognised in Europe for his leadership - and his most notable performance in driving efficient and effective operations for Sunrise Europe over the past several years.

With this latest move Sunrise continues to demonstrate it’s ability to take a global management perspective to it’s business.

The full press release is here.

May

press release:

Jon Sintorn has been appointed the new CEO of Permobil AB. He will take up the post on 1 September 2009. Mr Sintorn succeeds Hans Bergh who, after 20 years with the company, is leaving his position as CEO to serve on the Board of Directors.

Permobil is the global leader in advanced wheelchair solutions and has strong market positions in North America and Europe. The company is based in Timrå, Sweden and has 550 employees.

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Days Healthcare Germany - according to this announcement on their website has announced that they will be closing their German business effective end June. Days Healthcare Germany is part of the Irish multinational DCC group and was formerly known as Casacare.
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Market rumors abound that pharmaceutical sales reps at Pfizer may be the next to go. CNBC and Bloomberg are announcing the possibility that 2400 US domestic sales employees (about a third of the sales force) may be let go due to off patent drug expiry, and no doubt the current world financial crisis?

The irony is that we reported about a month ago that Pfizer was ranked number 1 in traditional detailing by physicians.

Pharmaceutical Sales Rep Calls And Sales Force Effectiveness - The Trend

It would not surprising of course to see sales rep layoffs coming in the medical device business as well - judging by the recent news at Cardinal.

Economic Downturn Hits Hospital Supply And Medical Device Business

There is an interesting article in PharmaLive which suggests that physicians are more satisfied now than before with the lower frequency of sales calls.

In data published by SDIHealth, Pfizer was ranked number 1 in traditional detailing.

Actually very few physicians or other health care professional object to sales calls as long as the calls are informative and helpful.

There are those that say that medical sales reps are going to go the way of newspapers and televisons as a result of the current new media communications methods.

It’s time to start a Facebook detailing application…

Sales force expert Jim McLean has written these interesting articles about Sales.

There is no doubt that the economic recession which has now touched all parts of the world is taking it’s toll on most industries.

One of the most resilient however is the healthcare industry. Sibaya LifeScience! recently interviewed several companies supplying services to “big pharma” in the form of contract manufacturing - especially drug delivery - at ICSE, P-Mec, Cphi - Frankfurt, Germany. While this was not a scientific study, anecdotally we were told that it was business as usual, in fact for some, business was clearly on the increase as manufacturing was being outsourced to contract manufacturers.

Not the case though for small and medium sized biotech companies according to this report in the IHT which lists companies in the Biotech hub in Massachusetts struggling for cash and laying off employees. Biotech companies need cash to fund research while waiting for their revenues to hopefully arrive one day, but in the US biotech companies have only been able to raise about half of what they did in the prior year.Technorati Tags: biotech, contract manufacturing

Hans Bergh, legendary CEO at Permobil has announced his intention to step down for personal reasons as soon as a successor is found. The process is being led by Tom Erixon, Chairman of the Board at Permobil and is expected to take several months.

Under Hans Bergh’s leadership the company has become the third largest producer of powered wheelchairs worldwide while he tripled their sales to approximately 120 million Euro.

Hans Bergh will continue as a member of the board and will contribute to several of the companies projects.

More Here (in Swedish)