Zurich, (Reuters) .- Roche announced that it would invest 50,000 million dollars in the United States over the next five years, creating more than 12,000 new jobs, in the most recent massive investment of companies that react to the tariff policy of President Donald Trump.
The announcement occurs while pharmacists reveal investments to deal with the Trump administration tariffs, which seeks to boost national manufacturing.
The Swiss Pharmaceutical Novartis said at the beginning of the month that it would spend 23,000 million pesos in the United States, while Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson also announced significant investments recently.
Roche and Novartis’s ads gave a boost to the Swiss president, Karin Keller Sutter, who will meet with senior US officials in Washington this week to try to reduce the American tariff of 31% on Swiss exports.
“Our investments have also aligned with the Swiss government and are part of the ongoing conversations between the United States and Switzerland,” said a Roche spokesman.
The executive director, Thomas Schinecker, said that the investment underlines Roche’s commitment to the United States, where he uses 25,000 people in 24 sites.
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Of the 12,000 new positions, almost 6,500 will be under construction and 1,000 in new and expanded facilities, said the Swiss pharmaceutical giant.
More US exports
Once the different facilities have sufficient capacity, Roche will export more drugs in the United States than matters, said the Basel company.
The United States is a crucial market for Roche, which generated almost 48% of its sales there in 2024, thanks to great success medications such as Xolair, for the treatment of asthma and food allergies, and Ocrevus for multiple sclerosis.
Roche will expand its manufacturing and distribution centers in Kentucky, Indiana, New Jersey and California, although some of the projects had already been previously announced.
The new plans revealed on Tuesday include a factory to produce weight loss, whose location was not yet announced, and a new plant for continuous glucose monitoring in Indiana.
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“Our investments of 50,000 million dollars during the next five years will lay the foundations for our next era of innovation and growth, benefiting patients in the United States and worldwide,” said Schinecker in a statement.
The executive did not mention the threat of imminent tariffs, although Roche has analyzed possible positions in recent weeks and was “well prepared to face them, apply mitigation and adapt measures,” said a spokesman.
Roche said there were no plans to cut their investments in the rest of the world, adding that it would provide more details of its investment strategy in the coming weeks.
Last week, the Trump administration initiated an investigation into imports of pharmaceutical products, as part of an attempt to impose tariffs on the sector.
The moment and scope of the encumbrances are still uncertain, but the impact could be large: last year pharmaceutical products were imported to the United States for about 213,000 million pesos, almost triple the 73,000 million pm in 2014, according to the United Nations trade database.
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