Good morning. Thirty-three days. That’s how long it took from the time AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot greeted Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin in his London office to announcing a $4 billion manufacturing facility in the state at a press conference in Washington yesterday. Soriot said it’s the European pharma giant’s largest-ever single manufacturing investment, negotiated at the fastest-ever speed. “Usually, this kind of discussion takes months,” he told me in D.C. “Sometimes you have a meeting of minds.”
The threat of tariffs is a factor in beefing up AstraZeneca’s U.S. manufacturing, of course, but Soriot says the investments make sense on other levels. “Our pipeline is moving quickly,” he told me. That’s especially true when it comes to the market for innovative weight-management drugs like oral GLP-1, which will be manufactured at the facility site, which has not yet been named. “Our bet is the U.S. economy will continue to grow and the U.S. will continue to dominate innovation.”
Then again, Soriot noted that China is also innovating fast. The drugmaker is investing billions there to beef up R&D and presumably help sway the political winds in his company’s favor.
