This week, much of the world got a reprieve from President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Drugmakers might not be so fortunate.
In recent days, Trump has said several times that pharma-specific tariffs will be arriving “very soon,” sending the industry scrambling to unpack what they might look like, when they might be announced and how they would be set.
White House policymaking has been unpredictable, but there are some clues on how pharma levies could be implemented, Mollie Sitkowski, a trade compliance partner at US law firm Faegre Drinker told
Endpoints News.
Industry-specific tariffs on other products provide at least one clue on how pharma might get hit. When the administration announced
automotive
tariffs on March 26, and
steel
levies on Feb. 10, they were set as a 25% tariff after an investigation.
A big question is what Trump defines as tariffs arriving “very soon.” One way to potentially forecast timelines is to understand what’s called a 232 investigation, to be conducted by the Department of Commerce.
This investigation provides details on whether certain imports pose a national risk to the US, and whether Trump can take the department’s recommendations or not. The maximum time this can take is 270 days, but it can be much shorter.
As a part of a 232 investigation, there is often an opportunity for the public to provide feedback to the Department of Commerce, through a posting on the Federal Register.
For instance, goods like copper and lumber have already had their investigations launched:
copper
in February and
timber and lumber
in March, with a
notice
asking for “interested parties” to provide feedback by April 1.
There’s no public notice yet that pharmaceuticals are under investigation. But Trump is not obliged to publicly announce his intentions, meaning this could already be underway, Sitkowski said
.
Leerink analysts believe Trump could announce pharma tariffs as soon as next week.
It’s likely Trump is planning a “dual track” approach to target pharmaceuticals, using the 232 investigation and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which could see the levy placed very quickly, they said in a Thursday note.
IEEPA essentially allows Trump to place levies on any trade after declaring a national emergency, which is what he used to place 10% tariffs on all countries last week. This two-pronged approach is due to the IEEPA being susceptible to being overturned in the Supreme Court in a year’s time.
Another question on the tariff rollout is if pharma tariffs could be stacked on top of Trump’s preexisting levies. This is likely to be the case for countries like China, whose tariffs have been stacked multiple times reaching a total of
125%
, Sitkowski added.
As it stands, it looks like all pharmaceutical goods, including API, will be levied. This would be a major blow to China — especially if tariffs are stacked — as it is a major supplier of API to the US.
“We don’t know what the pharmaceutical tariffs will be on China,” Leerink Partners analyst David Risinger told Endpoints. “Hopefully there will not be significant pharmaceutical tariffs on China simply because the US is dependent upon API for many critical medicines.”
Companies with manufacturing outside of China, or the ability to transfer production to a different country, will help them mitigate the trade war between the US and China, Briley Securities analysts said in a Thursday note.
India is also a major outsourcing hub for the US.
“We are very concerned as to what might happen, right? There’s obviously a lot of volatility that’s going on in the market,” Indian CDMO Aragen’s chief commercial officer Ashu Tandon said. “We like to have stability, particularly in businesses like ours, which require big CAPEX expenditures for setting up labs and manufacturing plants,” he added.
Another concern from companies is if the intellectual property of a drug will also be taxed, Barclays analyst Emily Field told Endpoints. The location of a drug’s IP could determine if it’s taxed or not, with companies with US patents likely to be protected, Briley Securities analysts added.
As drug prices are capped in the US and Europe, drugmakers will be the ones to eat off the cost of tariffs, Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks
said
in an interview with the
BBC
last week. Companies are likely to cut back on their headcounts, starting with R&D teams, he warned.
There is the chance that pharma companies would strike deals with Trump to evade tariffs, although that is yet to materialize, Sitkowski said. Some companies like Lilly and Johnson & Johnson have already been making a
push to reshore manufacturing
to the US to stay in the administration’s good graces, gaining praise from Trump during his Tariff speech last week.