JPM26: Thermo Fisher’s pharma services business benefits from US reshoring

In a Tuesday presentation at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Thermo Fisher Scientific CEO Marc Casper said the company’s pharmaceutical services business has won an undisclosed number of contracts to help its customers move manufacturing from Asia or Europe to the United States.

Thermo Fisher’s pharma services business — one of the world’s largest contract development and manufacturing organizations — is benefitting from the reshoring of manufacturing to the U.S., driven by President Trump’s threats to impose industry-specific tariffs and push for Most-Favored-Nation drug pricing.   

"There's a very big focus on reshoring more production and activity to the U.S. — and that is going to be a tailwind in ‘27 and ’28,” Casper told the JPM26 conference. "We’re winning new business. Part of the reason we acquired the Sanofi site was really a capital expansion, if you will, to be able to help customers do that.”

In July, Thermo Fisher announced it was buying Sanofi’s sterile drug product manufacturing facility in Ridgefield, New Jersey for an undisclosed amount, expanding its strategic partnership with the French drugmaker to enable additional production capacity in the U.S. The Ridgefield site, now part of Thermo Fisher’s pharma services business, specializes in fill‑finish and packaging of aseptic injectable medications.

The Ridgefield site expands the company’s U.S. capacity which will “allow us to accelerate those reshoring efforts for other clients,” Casper said.  

Pharma services is a high single-digit growth business for Thermo Fisher, according to Casper. The company will release its overall financial results for the fourth quarter and full year 2025 on Jan. 29,

Thermo Fisher’s network includes over 60 pharma services sites across 24 countries employing a workforce of more than 2,700 scientists and engineers.

In April, Thermo Fisher announced it was making a $2 billion commitment to U.S. manufacturing and R&D over the next four years. Of that amount, $1.5 billion is earmarked for capital expenditures to enhance and expand manufacturing. The company is also growing sterile fill-finish capabilities at its Greenville, North Carolina.

“We are the market leader in serving sterile fill-finish, which is final form of biologic medicines and injectables,” Casper said on Tuesday.

In February, Thermo Fisher paid $4.1 billion in cash to buy Solventum’s purification and filtration business, whose technologies are used in the development and manufacturing of biologics, spanning upstream and downstream workflows. 

“Solventum purification and filtration is a great complement to our bioproduction business,” Casper said at JPM26. “We have leadership in cell culture media and single-use technologies. This is our entry into filtration and it’s a good platform that we can grow over time.”