Pfizer inks IT outsourcing deal in China

08/03/2007 - Pfizer is consolidating all its IT helpdesk operations in the Asia-Pacific to a central site in China under a new outsourcing arrangement with Hewlett-Packard.

Hewlett-Packard''s newly-established Global Solution Center in Dalian, northeast China, will be used to house the new setup.

The company is already in the process of moving all of Pfizer's helpdesk operations in Japan to the site, which will be up and running by mid 2007.

Following this, Hewlett-Packard will then also migrate the helpdesk outfits of 13 other countries in the Asia-Pacific to the Chinese site, over three stages.

The countries involved in the reshuffle are Thailand, Indonesia, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and India.

Hewlett-Packard said the consolidation effort will allow Pfizer to reduce the number of staff required to run its Asian-Pacific helpdesk services, as well as benefit from the use of shared facilities.

Pfizer was asked by Outsourcing-Pharma.com to comment on the scale of cost and other savings that such a consolidation effort is expected to bring, however, the firm failed to do so.

Indeed, Pfizer has been chasing a number of cost-cutting initiatives of late in the face of looming patent expiries for its biggest-selling drugs as well as the recent high-profile failure of a late-stage pipeline project, torcetrapib.

As part of this, the world's biggest drugmaker announced plans in January to axe 10,000 jobs and close facilities by the end of next year and indicated it would also step up its outsourcing efforts.

Hewlett-Packard has been providing Pfizer with IT support services, such as helpdesk, data centre, network and server management, since 1999. All terms of this latest, substantially-sized deal, however, remain undisclosed.