Despite many overseas drugmakers gaining some tariff clarity when the U.S. struck a trade deal with the EU over the summer, Swiss pharma giants like Novartis and Roche were notably left out as their country endured one of President Donald Trump\u2019s steepest levies.<\/p>\n
Now, thanks to a fresh accord with the U.S., import tariffs on many key goods from Liechtenstein and Switzerland\u2014including pharmaceuticals\u2014will be capped at 15%, falling in line with the terms in the EU agreement the U.S. signed in August.<\/p>\n
Prior to the new trade deal, the U.S. had saddled Switzerland with one of the highest import tariff rates<\/a> in the world at 39%.<\/p>\n As part of the new framework between the countries, Switzerland plans to \u201cencourage and facilitate\u201d at least $200 billion in investments to the U.S. over the next five years, with a particular emphasis on generating manufacturing and R&D jobs, according to a joint statement<\/a> (PDF) issued by the Swiss Confederation late last week.<\/p>\n Some $67 billion of that target investment is expected to arrive in 2026, the White House noted in a Nov. 14 fact sheet addressing<\/a> the trade agreement. The White House spotlighted the \u201cbillions of dollars of investment\u201d Swiss companies have already made in the U.S. \u201cin connection with the framework,\u201d singling out commitments by drug juggernauts Roche and Novartis.<\/p>\n Under the deal, Switzerland and Liechtenstein will also open their markets to U.S. medical devices, the White House added in its communique.<\/p>\n Switzerland is home to a thriving biopharma ecosystem<\/a> as well as several commercial biopharma juggernauts in Roche, Novartis and biosimilar and generics specialist Sandoz. In 2024, the U.S. spent<\/a> some $35.5 billion on pharmaceutical imports from Switzerland, up nearly $5 billion from the sum the country spent on Swiss drugs in 2023.<\/p>\n But Switzerland, by virtue of being outside the bloc, did not benefit from a U.S.-EU trade deal over the summer, which capped import tariffs<\/a> on many European goods, including drugs, at 15%.<\/p>\n As the Trump administration inks individual accords with a host of trading partners, the exact nature of pharmaceutical import duties in the U.S. continues to be impacted by a number of moving parts.<\/p>\n In late September, Trump announced<\/a> via social media that, beginning Oct. 1, the U.S. would slap a 100% tariff on any \u201cbranded or patented\u201d pharmaceutical product coming into the country unless the drug\u2019s manufacturer was actively building a local production plant.<\/p>\n But, as October arrived, the rollout of the tariffs was apparently put on hold<\/a> as the administration sought to give the industry time to engage on another of Trump\u2019s bugbears, drug pricing.<\/p>\n Subsequently, a string of companies\u2014Pfizer<\/a>, AstraZeneca<\/a>, Eli Lilly<\/a>, Novo Nordisk and Merck KGaA\u2019s U.S. arm EMD Serono<\/a>\u2014have forged agreements with the U.S. government to sell certain drugs and future medicines at lower prices under a so-called \u201cmost favored nation\u201d framework.<\/p>\n In principle, Trump\u2019s most favored nation drug pricing push seeks to align the costs of U.S. medicines with the prices paid in certain other high-income countries.<\/p>\n Each drugmaker that has inked a drug pricing deal with Trump in recent weeks has also won temporary immunity from the president\u2019s pharmaceutical import tariffs. More drug pricing deals are expected to come, but neither Novartis nor Roche have yet to announce such a deal with the U.S.<\/p>\n Still, the crosstown rivals aren\u2019t about to be caught flatfooted around tariffs, with executives at both Roche and Novartis keeping cool on the topic during recent earnings calls.<\/p>\n \u201cI can say that we\u2019ve been in discussions with the U.S. government for most part of this year,\u201d Roche CEO Thomas Schinecker said<\/a> of the company\u2019s drug pricing talks on a conference call last month.\u00a0 The executive further pointed to Roche\u2019s 13 U.S. manufacturing sites, plus efforts to make its production more efficient in recent years, noting that \u201cthere is nothing for us at this stage where we would be concerned\u201d when it comes to tariffs.<\/p>\n Back in April, Roche said it was committing<\/a> $50 billion to the U.S. over the next five years, with much of the investment pledge centered on manufacturing.<\/p>\n For its part, Novartis has pledged<\/a> $23 billion to beef up its operations stateside. Most of that outlay will fuel R&D growth, and, while the Swiss drug giant is working on a few manufacturing expansions, those projects will more so be about reallocating resources from other parts of the world to the U.S., Novartis Chief Financial Officer Harry Kirsch told analysts<\/a> late last month.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite many overseas drugmakers gaining some tariff clarity when the U.S. struck a trade deal with the EU…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86791,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[124],"tags":[18,4175,197,37899,41939,20575,228,10058,206,2536,69,134,2101,17,112,497,74],"class_list":["post-86790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-roche","tag-donald-trump","tag-drug-manufacturing","tag-europe","tag-facilities","tag-fierce-pharma-homepage","tag-imports","tag-manufacturing","tag-manufacturing-facilities","tag-novartis","tag-pharma","tag-politics","tag-roche","tag-sandoz","tag-switzerland","tag-tariffs","tag-trade","tag-united-states"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116770965218517532","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}