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This earnings season, Europe’s biggest pharma companies posted results ranging from 7% beats to 3% misses — but no one really cared.
Instead, drugmakers looked ahead, with 2026 shaping up to be a defining year following a dramatic 2025, and one where the impact from last year’s developments is set to crystallize.
“2025 was about understanding kind of the rules of the future of the game… what’s still to be seen in [2026] is how those companies actually implement what they agreed to, particularly in the deals that you saw with the Trump administration,” McKinsey Senior Partner Greg Graves told CNBC.
In addition to political dealings, companies are facing a so-called “patent cliff” in the upcoming years, where some of the world’s best-selling drugs lose exclusivity in key markets, exposing them to competition from much cheaper generics.
