Dive Brief:

• Juul Labs announced a company restructuring yesterday to reduce its operating costs and position itself to move forward “during a period of regulatory and marketplace uncertainty,” the e-cigarette maker said in a Wednesday statement.
• The restructuring includes “substantially reducing” Juul’s headcount and “saying goodbye to a number of highly valued team members,” according to the statement. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Juul has laid off about 250 employees — or 30% of its staff — amid these cuts.
• This marks Juul’s second major layoff over the past year as the company endures a tumultuous stretch filled with lawsuits and revenue declines. Juul fired about 400 employees in November 2022.

Dive Insight:

Juul’s latest restructuring aims to help the company maximize profitability and cash-flow generation while focusing that money on its core priorities, the company said. Those include delivering “high quality” products to its commercial partners, developing its next generation of products and continuing to engage with the FDA on the company’s market authorization applications.

The company said the reductions will help increase its adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) margins and “generate meaningful free cash flow before litigation settlements.” Juul also noted the reductions will allow it to extend its timeline to pursue its FDA marketing orders, which would allow it to market and sell its products in the U.S.

“As difficult as this moment is, we remain fundamentally optimistic about the prospects for [Juul] — a view rooted in our belief that our technology and our pipeline of new innovations represent the most valuable ever brought forward to transition adult smokers away from cigarettes while combating underage use,” Juul said in the statement.

Wednesday’s restructuring came just a few days after Altria subsidiary Njoy, one of the few vaping companies with products approved by the FDA for marketing in the U.S., accused Juul of patent infringement.

Juul had undergone sizable layoffs even before last year. It cut around 650 jobs in November 2019 as it stopped selling its popular mint-flavored e-cigarette refill pods; around 900 employees in April 2020 as it grappled with a falling e-cigarette market share; and more than half of its remaining workforce in September 2020 as part of a broader restructuring.