Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. said it's on the hunt for American industrial sites as it boosts the scope of its manufacturing expansion program to $50 billion after President Donald Trump’s recent threat to implement tariffs on products including drugs.
Eli Lilly announced the plan on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., after a meeting last week with Trump, Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks and other pharmaceutical industry executives to discuss industry concerns, according to Reuters. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said at the news conference that Eli Lilly’s expansion plan in the U.S. is “exactly what the President was hoping would happen.”
The drugmaker operates manufacturing plants in Europe and Asia, including China, and the company said in its latest annual report that tariffs and other trade restrictions "could significantly impact our business and results of operations." Economists have said if U.S. tariffs are implemented they could result in increased costs for Americans.
Eli Lilly had previously announced expansions of its U.S.-based production facilities with a total investment value of $23 billion. The company is now adding another $27 billion to the program, raising the total value to $50 billion since 2020.
The company said in a statement that it’s in talks with “several states and welcomes additional interest” by March 12 regarding potential development sites. Eli Lilly said it will announce the future sites this year and expects the plants will be operational within five years. Eli Lilly did not provide details on the estimated size or cost of each project.
Eli Lilly is already underway in expanding manufacturing capacity to support the production of blockbuster weight-loss drug Mounjaro, for which the company charges nearly $1,000 per month before insurance in the U.S. according to drug review organization DrugWatch, and other top-selling medicines. Its projects include expansions of existing facilities near the company’s hometown of Indianapolis and new facilities near Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina. Eli Lilly said the new initiative will more than double the size of its ongoing construction program to $50 billion when taking into account projects that started in 2020.
Drugmakers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have seen sales spike for new drugs that treat obesity and diabetes and both have experienced periods of supply shortages. Novo Nordisk in June announced plans to develop a $4.1 billion manufacturing plant near Raleigh.
The four new manufacturing facilities planned by Eli Lilly will “bolster its domestic medicine production across therapeutic areas,” the company said in the release. Eli Lilly described those therapeutic areas as cardiometabolic health, oncology, immunology and neuroscience.
Three of the four new properties will “focus on manufacturing active pharmaceutical ingredients, reshoring critical capabilities of small molecule chemical synthesis and further strengthening Lilly's supply chain” and the fourth facility will extend its manufacturing network for “future injectable therapies," Eli Lilly said in its statement.