Evotec is eliminating up to 800 employees—about one-sixth of its global workforce—in a restructuring that also includes the shutdown of four facilities and other moves intended to cut costs, accelerate company growth, and speed up operations.
The layoffs will occur across all its 14 locations in Europe and the U.S., which will shrink over the next two years as Evotec closes four of its facilities worldwide in order to shrink expenses and simplify its organizational structure.
Evotec said its workforce now numbers more than 4,800. The company says it works with all top 20 pharma companies, more than 800 biotechs, academic institutions, and healthcare stakeholders.
In addition to the layoffs, Evotec will overhaul its operating structure by concentrating its scientific expertise and innovation infrastructure into new hubs or “Centers of Excellence” designed to strengthen its competitiveness in what it deems as “high value” segments within drug discovery and preclinical development.
Discovery and Preclinical Development (D&PD) is one of two business segments through which Evotec reports its financial results; the other is Just-Evotec Biologics (JEB), a subsidiary focused on designing, developing, and manufacturing biologics, specifically antibody-based therapeutics. JEB operates a process engineering and biologics R&D site in Seattle, and a J.POD® flexible biomanufacturing facility in nearby Redmond, WA.
Both those sites would remain, as would a drug discovery hub for U.S. cell & protein production in Princeton, NJ, and a sample management site in Branford, CT. Evotec would also continue to operate sites in Alderley Park, U.K.; Toulouse, France; Verona and Modena, Italy; and Göttingen and Hamburg, Germany. Hamburg is home to Evotec’s headquarters.
Framingham among sites to close
Set for shutdown are four Evotec sites:
- Abingdon, U.K.—Integrated drug discovery and development facility.
- Framingham, MA—Cyprotex subsidiary, which relocated in 2023 from Watertown, MA, to a facility intended for further growth of its ADME-Tox services business for U.S.-based customers.
- Lyon, France—Anti-infective drug discovery facility.
- Munich, Germany—Proteomics, bioinformatics, and “omics” platform facilities.
Through its restructuring, which the company has dubbed “Horizons,” Evotec aims to cut expenses between 2026 and 2030 by streamlining its operations for faster execution of company priorities, with improved customer responsiveness and value creation.
Evotec said it expected its Horizon initiatives will generate ~€75 million (about $86.5 million) in projected annual, recurring “run rate” savings by the end of 2027.
“These changes allow us to focus much more effectively and capitalize on our core scientific strength. They enable us to serve our markets with greater agility, deliver faster translation of science and better utilization of people, platforms and capital,” Evotec CEO Christian Wojczewski, PhD, told analysts Wednesday on a conference call.
“The new operating model and global setup strengthens our commercial execution, enabling more customer mandates, higher win rates and better cross-sell across platforms, while keeping on-time delivery and first time-right execution at the core of customer value.”
Investors appeared more sanguine about the changes Thursday morning. Evotec shares on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange’s Xetra market remained flat, inching up just 0.7% to €4.39 ($5.06) as of 10:01 a.m. ET. Also flat were the company’s American depositary shares on Nasdaq, which dipped 0.6% to $2.49 as of 10:16 a.m. ET.
Preliminary financial results
In addition to the layoffs and other restructuring moves, Evotec announced preliminary, unaudited full-year 2025 financial results. The company finished last year with adjusted group earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of approximately €41 million ($47.3 million), just above the midpoint of Evotec’s guidance range of €30 million to €50 million ($34.6 million to $57.6 million)—and up 81% from €22.6 million ($26 million) in 2024.
“Adjusted” EBITDA excludes €0.6 million (just over $691,000) in one-off costs from its “Transformation” phase of its corporate restructuring, announced in 2025.
Evotec’s 2025 revenues were approximately €788 million ($908 million), down 1% from €797 million ($918 million) in 2024, though at the high end of the company’s scaled-back revised guidance of between €760 million and €800 million ($876 million and $922 million). However, Evotec initially told investors last April that it expected 2025 revenues to be between €840 million and €880 million ($968 million and $1.014 billion).
Evotec also reported preliminary unaudited 2025 results projecting a 71% year-over-year drop in adjusted EBITDA for D&PD, to approximately €12 million ($13.8 million), on revenue that tumbled 13% from 2024, to approximately €529 million ($609.7 million).
JEB finished last year with approximately €53 million ($61 million) in adjusted EBITDA, more than five times the €9.9 million ($11.4 million) reported for 2024, on revenue that soared 40% year-over-year to approximately €259 million ($298.5 million).
2026 guidance
For 2026, Evotec is guiding investors to adjusted group EBITDA of between zero and €40 million (zero to $46 million) on group revenues of between €700 million and €780 million ($806 million and $898 million).
Evotec unveiled its “priority reset” in April 2024, combining that announcement with the elimination of some 400 jobs, a withdrawal from gene therapy development, and the selloff of a chemical active pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturing site in Halle/Westphalia, Germany.
The move to a priority reset was intended to boost Evotec’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA). Instead, the company’s EBITDA swung to a loss and its stock price plunged 60% by November 8, 2024. That day, Evotec disclosed in a regulatory filing that private equity firm Triton Partners took a 9.99% stake in the company. Three days later, Bloomberg News reported that Triton was among several investment firms looking to acquire the contract research organization.
Also in November 2024, Halozyme Therapeutics confirmed making an unsolicited offer to acquire Evotec for €2 billion ($2.1 billion at the time; $2.3 billion today), only to withdraw that offer two weeks later after the company said it wished to remain independent.
GEN cited the merger-and-acquisition interest in Evotec when it included the company in its A-List of the Top 10 Takeover Targets of 2025, published in February of that year.
