• The New York Times, Tuesday, January 23, 2007 1:15 PM

Saying that "incremental evolution is not enough," Pfizer CEO Jeffrey B. Kindler vowed to overhaul the way it does business yesterday while announcing that the company would ax an additional 7,800 workers and close several manufacturing and research sites.

Pfizer--and its competitors--face a changing marketplace. Big-selling drugs introduced by the industry in the 1990s are now losing patent protection, opening them to generic competition. At the same time, the pharmaceutical companies have not been able to develop new products quickly enough.

In addition, sales forces have grown in a sort of arms race, often with multiple sales representatives from a single company calling on the same doctor. Pfizer said it would reorganize its sales force and research and development to focus on specific disease categories.

Pfizer also said it would seek to license products from smaller companies, or buy such companies, and would move more into the protein-based drugs typically made by biotechnology companies.

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