By coinnews 
00:00 Brian Sozzi
AstraZeneca is on the move today after posting mixed results for the first quarter, missing revenue estimates, but beating on EPS. The pharmaceutical giant reiterating its 2025 guidance and says it’s committed to investing in the US as the industry faces tariff threats from President Trump. Joining me now, we’ve got Pascal Soriot, who is the AstraZeneca chief executive officer, and Yahoo Finance senior health reporter, Anjalee Khemlani. Pascal, great to have you here with us this morning and thanks for taking the time. You’re you’re actually calling for no additional US levies on pharmaceuticals. What’s is the plan and and the analysis per AstraZeneca on that potential tariff threat?
01:04 Pascal Soriot
Uh, Brian Madison, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be with you. Um, we believe that, uh, the best way forward is to not charge, uh, tariffs on pharmaceuticals, but, uh, create an environment that attracts investments through, uh, an attractive corporate tax rate. That’s a general comment because as a company, we have a very broad manufacturing, uh, footprint in the US. We have 11 manufacturing sites. We manufacture small molecules, large molecules, we even have two large recent investments in cell therapy manufacturing. So we are, uh, relatively self-sufficient. The great majority of our products sold in the US are manufactured in the US. We actually export from the US. And there’s a couple of products we still make in Europe and we are moving that manufacturing to the US very rapidly. So we are not really affected by this in a great to a great extent. But certainly, we believe that, uh, a great environment of, you know, uh, supporting investment in R&D and, uh, creating, uh, attractive tax environment would help, uh, attract investment.
03:01 Anjalee Khemlani
Pascal, Anjalee here. Uh, good to see you again. And, and, you know, I’ve heard you say, especially on the call this morning, about the sort of lack of long-term impact here, but you’ve also been pushing a lot for the European regulators to pay attention and for governments to pay attention to this tariff move and its impact, um, really in the continent. And so I wonder, how does that, uh, you know, really mix with your focus on moving to the US? But then also as someone who is European looking at the local sort of domestic picture and why the push there rather than rely on those US exports?
04:04 Pascal Soriot
Yeah, it’s a really great question, Anjalee. The I mean, I think you’ve got to start from what are we trying to achieve as an industry? We are here to, uh, come up with innovative medicines. And in the last few years, five to 10 years, the innovation in our industry has exploded. There is a whole series of technologies that are bringing new medicines and make, uh, the day when we can cure some cancers not that far away. But to get there, we have to have as many countries contributing to the global R&D effort. And the problem we have is that a lot a large part of our innovation effort in our industry is is actually funded uh by the US. So our view is that Europe has to allocate more funding, uh, to innovative pharmaceuticals, um, a greater share of their healthcare, uh, expenditures should go to innovative pharmaceuticals, so that Europe allocate a greater share of their GDP to to this innovation, just like they have to allocate a greater share of their GDP to defense as well. Similar mechanisms, we have to have a rebalancing of investments and Europe has to contribute to this innovation effort. Uh, and, you know, it can’t be only the US funding it.
06:05 Anjalee Khemlani
Fair. And on that innovation point, I know that you’re also in the obesity space. I heard Rudner say earlier that if you get your oral to phase two, you’re gonna start thinking about how to build out capacity. Is that an uncertain picture right now when it comes to US versus XUS market? Or are you looking at just focusing on the US right now when it comes to that? And as a follow-up to that also, um, does Pfizer’s removal from that race sort of give you momentum?
06:55 Pascal Soriot
Yeah, two great questions. I mean, first of all, the the manufacturing part, we’ve been investing in manufacturing in the US, in China, and in Europe. Uh, but of course, the US is our number one priority because it’s a larger market, lots of lots of unmet needs to to address and also a very strong innovation sector. Uh, so we will continue to invest in manufacturing, but also in R&D. We have two very large R&D centers, one near Washington and one in, uh, Kendall Square in Boston, in in Cambridge and Boston. So we will continue to make make those investments. In particular, we will invest in the US for the manufacturing at scale of our anti- of our obesity portfolio products. So, you know, this will remain a great priority for us both from an R&D perspective, but also from a manufacturing perspective.