SEOUL/SHANGHAI (Reuters) -Shares of Asian drugmakers mostly fell on Friday after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened 100% tariffs on imports of branded pharmaceuticals from October 1, unless their producers had already broken ground on U.S. manufacturing plants.
In South Korea, Samsung Biologics fell 1.6%, while SK Biopharmaceuticals slid 2.6%.
But Celltrion, which said on Tuesday it had paid $330 million to acquire ImClone Systems LLC from Eli Lilly in the United States, rose 1.3% after recouping losses.
In Japan, Sumitomo Pharma tumbled 4.3%, Otsuka Holdings dropped 3.5%, and Daiichi Sankyo lost 1.6%, although Takeda added 0.2% and Shionogi gained 1.3%.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Biotech Index was down about 2.58%.
Markets had already been braced for further tariffs and investigations by the Commerce Department, said Carol Kong, economist and currency strategist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney.
“The sectoral tariffs are here to stay because those have proven to be more legally sound than the emergency tariffs that the lower courts judged to be illegal,” she said.
“Sectoral tariffs are going to push the U.S. government’s effective tariff rate a little bit high – it was about 10% in August, we expect the global effective tariff rate to edge further to about 18% in the coming months.”
However, the broader impact on economies like Japan and Australia may be fairly limited, she added.
(Reporting by Andrew Silver in Shanghai, Jihoon Lee and Heekyong Yang in Seoul, Gregor Stuart Hunter in Singapore and Kevin Buckland in Tokyo; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Jamie Freed)
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