For the drug industry, President Donald Trump’s tariffs haven’t started to really hurt. At least not yet.
On Thursday, several of the world’s largest pharma companies — Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb, Sanofi and Roche — reported quarterly earnings and shared their financial forecasts for the year. The message from the industry is that the impact of the tariffs is real, but manageable. And the drugmakers were eager to position themselves as fully prepared for whatever may come next.
“We have run all scenarios,” Sanofi CFO François-Xavier Roger said on a call with reporters Thursday.
But the biggest risk is yet to come. On calls with investors and reporters, pharma leaders were tight-lipped about the threat of industry-specific tariffs on drugs. Trump has taken aim at pharma with a desire to see more manufacturing in the US. He
said on April 8
that “we’re going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals.” The timing, scope and severity of these tariffs, though, remain unknown.
Global trade, markets and economies were thrown into uncertainty by Trump’s announcement of sweeping and severe tariffs on April 2 (drug products were excluded from that policy). Since then, Trump has announced a 90-day pause on the bulk of his tariff plan, while saying his administration is working to strike new trade deals around the globe — though has shown little real progress. He has also
softened his tone on tariffs on China,
although nothing has been finalized.
The tariffs that have already been announced primarily target China and are based on the cost of goods sold, leaving relatively little impact on branded medicines, for which manufacturing costs are a fraction of the real prices companies charge.
The drug industry is closely watching whether the White House might try and tariff not just the manufacturing cost of drugs made overseas, but the value they bring when sold in the US. On earnings calls, drug executives have largely declined to speculate on the topic, as well as other hypotheticals.
“It really is simply too early to provide a lot more on pharma-specific [tariffs],” Bristol Myers CEO Chris Boerner said, “so we’ll have to wait for the specifics there.”
“I don’t want to speculate on what the tariffs could be, because we need to see what the language is from the administration,” Merck CEO Rob Davis said, in response to an analyst asking if 25% pharma tariffs were a reasonable expectation.
For other parts of the healthcare industry, including generic drugmakers and tools or services companies, the impacts have been more severe. Thermo Fisher Scientific, for instance, said Wednesday it expected to
miss out on $400 million in revenue
for 2025 resulting from fewer sales of US-made products in China, given the tariffs will lower trade volume. Thermo’s stock traded down about 2% Thursday morning.
China’s trade tax on US-made products appears, in fact, to be one of the largest impacts on the pharma industry so far. The country
raised its tariffs
on US goods to 125% in retaliation for the Trump administration’s similar measure.
Merck, for example, forecast $200 million in extra costs related to tariffs for its 2025 guidance. That primarily is from US-made products headed into China and China-made products coming to the US. It’s a tiny hit compared with the $64.1 billion to $65.6 billion in sales the company expects this year.
Johnson & Johnson,
in its earnings last week
, disclosed a $400 million expected impact in 2025 from these tariffs, mainly felt by its medtech unit and also related to China.
Roche, Sanofi and Bristol Myers didn’t break down expected impacts from these previously announced tariffs.
To try and mitigate the impact of the trade war, the industry has
boosted inventory of drugs in various countries
, especially in the US and China. Merck said Thursday it has built up enough supply in the US of its top-selling cancer drug Keytruda to make it through 2025.
Roche has also stockpiled inventory in the US and China, which will limit any tariff impacts for the second quarter, CEO Thomas Schinecker added. He said four medicines make up “potentially 92%” of the company’s possible tariff exposure. Roche has boosted US production for three of those drugs and started the tech transfer process weeks ago on the fourth. He declined to name the drugs.
Looking ahead, existing US manufacturing is running at about 50% capacity, Schinecker said, giving Roche the ability to boost manufacturing in the US “basically overnight” if needed.