Number employed at Roche could double over next 10-15 years

The Roche pharmaceutical company has been operating in the canton since 1969. As can be seen in the table showing the number of people employed there over the years, the number of people working there has risen from 58 to 2406 (as of 2018).

What can also be noticed is that there was a fall in the number of employed there in the early Nineties. Current CEO Severin Schwan (in the photograph along with the head of the Rotkreuz site, Annette Luther), explained what prompted this. “At that time we were in the red and we had not reached a certain critical size with regard to the development of our diagnostics operations, and abandoning this division was being considered,” he said, adding how the uncertainty at that time had led employees to leave.

Fortunately, the right decisions were taken and the company began to develop equipment for the analysis of blood, urine and tissue as a core area of its business. Following the acquisition of the German Boehringer Mannheim company in 1997, Roche went on to become the market leader worldwide in the diagnostics sector, a situation which remains today. With a world market share of 20 per cent, the Basel-headquartered pharmaceutical company is ahead of Siemens, Abbott and Danaher in this sector.

It all began fifty years ago with the acquisition of the ERA (Elektromedizin und Respiratoren AG) company of Zug, which made breathing equipment, prior to the setting-up of the Tegimenta AG company of Zug with 58 employees in 1969. Ten years later Roche moved to Rotkreuz for space reasons; now it is the largest private employer in the canton with no fewer than 2,406 full-time employees who work in areas such as the development, production and marketing of equipment and software relating to diagnostics. Of note, too, is that Roche has invested as much as CHF 600 million in its Rotkreuz site over the past 15 years.

For the past five years, Annette Luther has been responsible for the Rotkreuz site and last Wednesday she and Schwan revealed the company’s ambitious plans for the site. She mentioned how the company had bought an adjacent site, currently still a field of maize, two years ago, followed, more recently, by another large area of land on the other side of the road, meaning that the company had been able to increase the area it occupied by one quarter. At present, plans for several more buildings are in the pipeline. “Once complete, in 10 to 15 years’ time, it could mean doubling the number of people we employ,” she said, adding that this was not set in stone.

“We believe the combination of data management, pharmacy and diagnostics will become even more important,” said Schwan, adding that, in future, Roche would not just be offering instruments and tests, but digital decision-making aids, helping to make treatment more targeted and efficient, digitalisation accelerating personalised medicine enormously, and Rotkreuz at the forefront of it all,” said Schwan.

It was mentioned how Roche had already invested much in digitalisation not least through the acquisition of the US Flatiron Health and Foundation Medicine companies. Though in one area, Schwan felt more should be done by the state. “The health system generates much valuable data but not all remains recorded electronically, Switzerland not yet having introduced electronic patient records, while this is standard in many countries,” he complained.

“If it is the case that pharmacy, diagnostics and digitalisation are to become increasingly important as we foresee, then digital data must be pushed accordingly. Once done, patients will benefit as the whole health system will become more efficient through better evaluation of data, and treatment methods enhanced accordingly,” concluded the CEO.