Sawt Falasteen - Novartis chief eyes ways to end higher US drug prices: media

Vasant Narasimhan told the Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ) that his company was "working to eliminate the price gap between the US and other industrialised countries".

"We are working with the government and trying to find constructive solutions so that Americans pay less for their medicines," he told the Swiss daily.

While pharmaceutical products have been spared so far from the tariffs Washington has slapped on its trading partners, US President Donald Trump has threatened to hit the entire sector with tariffs of as much as 250 percent if drug prices do not drop.

Narasimhan suggested it made sense to bring down US prices.

"It is a fact that American patients pay for a large part of the innovations," he acknowledged to the NZZ, insisting that "countries outside the US will have to contribute a larger share in the future".

Pharmaceutical companies are meanwhile facing massive pressure from the Trump administration to move production to the United States.

Novartis already announced in April that it plans to invest $23 billion in the United States over five years.

The goal was "to manufacture the most important products for the American market locally", he said, adding that it would "probably take three to four years to get there".

But he estimated the company could "make significant shifts within the next two years", including carrying out some of the final filling and packaging in the United States.

These efforts, he said, should allow Novartis to weather the situation if pharmaceuticals are hit with the same tariffs Washington has already slapped on other exports from the European countries where it has most of its production.

Washington is currently taxing imports from the EU at 15 percent and from Switzerland at 39 percent.

Novartis's rapid US expansion "should allow us to fully mitigate any tariffs", Narasimhan said.

The company was "more concerned about the tariffs for the entire industry", he acknowledged.

Narasimhan said he was not worried about finding enough workers to staff Novartis's new US factories, anticipating that massive pharmaceutical industry investment pledges would boost the US education system to turn out more specialists.

He added that many pharmaceutical factory processes were "fully automated".

"We only need a total of 1,000 to 1,500 additional workers to operate our planned new factories in the US," he said.

"That's manageable."

P.Tamimi--SF-PST