Trump’s promise to lower drug prices rattles Swiss pharma stocks

Roche and Novartis lost up to 3% in Zurich on Monday morning. Keystone / Georgios Kefalas

US President Trump wants to make medicines, some of which are exorbitantly expensive, cheaper in the US. This would mean huge losses for drugmakers, including those in Switzerland.

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Shares in the pharmaceutical sector have come under heavy pressure worldwide due to concerns about profitability in the US business. US President Donald Trump wants to lower prices for prescription drugs in the USA and is therefore targeting the entire industry.

One of the “most consequential decrees” in US history will be signed on Monday, the Republican announced on his online platform Truth Social. Trump had already held out the prospect of an “earth-shattering” announcement last week. US media had already speculated that it could be about drug prices.

The fact that Trump now wants to get serious has put pharmaceutical shares under heavy pressure internationally: the losses are likely to extend to the US stock markets via Japan and Europe. In European trading on Monday, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk were hit particularly hard with losses of almost 6%. Shares in AstraZeneca and GSK fell by up to 4% in London. Roche and Novartis lost up to 3% in Zurich. Pfizer was down 2.3% in pre-market trading in New York.

Trump wants to force pharmaceutical companies to accept internationally comparable prices. He sees his country at a disadvantage due to high prices. In the US, there is no central government price regulation that applies to all medicines. The pharmaceutical industry plays the most important role in the question of how much a drug costs – government influence is limited. This sometimes leads to enormously high prices – in an international comparison, many drugs in the US are significantly more expensive.

The world wonders why prescription drugs are so much more expensive in the US than in other countries around the world, even though they are produced in the same laboratory by the same company, Trump wrote. He promised that drug prices in the US would fall by 30-80% “almost immediately”.

Translated from German by DeepL/jdp

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