Editor’s (re)View: Novo Nordisk isn’t pandering to Trump with US manufacturing pledge

This week, British pharmaceutical giant GSK announced plans to invest $30 billion in its R&D and supply chain infrastructure in the United States over the next five years. In addition, Eli Lilly said it will build a $5 billion manufacturing facility near Richmond, Virginia, as part of its planned $27 billion U.S. investment.

Amid pressure from President Donald Trump to bolster U.S. manufacturing, Big Pharma companies such as Eli Lilly and GSK have grabbed headlines with tens of billions of dollars in promised investments in this country. However, conspicuously absent from the flurry of high-profile announcements this year is Novo Nordisk.

While Novo Nordisk will spend approximately $9 billion in 2025 to “create additional capacity” across its supply chain, according to the company’s 2024 annual report released earlier this year, it is a global investment with “significant expansions” of its existing production facilities in Brazil, China, Denmark, France, as well as the U.S.

In June 2024, the Danish drugmaker announced plans to invest $4.1 billion to build a second fill-finish facility in Clayton, North Carolina, making it one of the largest manufacturing investments in the company’s history. Still, so far in 2025, Novo Nordisk has refrained from making high-dollar public commitments to investing in the U.S. like rival Eli Lilly. 

At the same time, the company has strongly urged the Department of Commerce to not recommend pharma-specific tariffs on drugs imported to the U.S. as part of its ongoing investigation into the feasibility of increasing domestic capacity for pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical ingredients. 

“Tariffs on imports of Novo Nordisk’s products and the inputs on which its U.S. manufacturing operations rely will result in severe supply chain disruptions and market instability,” the company warned in its comments on the Commerce Department’s probe, noting that these disruptions “could significantly hamper and delay our continued and future investments in the United States.”

Novo Nordisk said that over the past decade it has invested more than $24 billion in the U.S. to expand manufacturing capacity and R&D in nine states, totaling 5.4 million square feet with new investments in Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia.

However, all active pharmaceutical ingredient for semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) imported into the U.S. comes from a manufacturing site in Denmark and is shipped directly to Novo Nordisk’s facilities in Bloomington, Indiana and Clayton, North Carolina, according to the company.

“Our commitment to the U.S. remains strong and we hope to be able to continue our investments; however, as the Administration considers tariffs on the pharmaceutical sector, we urge the Administration to recognize the strength of the pharmaceutical supply chain and the need to ensure strategic geographic diversity,” Novo Nordisk said.

All of this comes as Novo Nordisk last week announced a major restructuring that includes cutting approximately 9,000 jobs, or about 11% of its global workforce. Under the plan, the drugmaker is looking to streamline operations and reinvest for growth opportunities in diabetes and obesity, as it continues to face growing competition from Eli Lilly.

“Over the past years, Novo Nordisk’s rapid scaling has increased organizational complexity and costs,” the company said. “The transformation aims at addressing that complexity, so Novo Nordisk can invest more behind its science, commercial capabilities and manufacturing ramp-up.”

Will that mean more investment in U.S. infrastructure? It could but the drugmaker’s strategic production sites are also in four other countries — Brazil, China, Denmark, and France — with Novo Nordisk remaining committed to a regionalization strategy.

As then-CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen said earlier this year, Novo Nordisk has a global manufacturing network and “in a world with a lot of tariffs, we can redirect products in different ways so they become more localized and maybe fewer crossing borders.” That strategy for regional redundancy and capacity distribution now falls to new CEO Mike Doustdar.