On Wednesday (AEST), the US administration said it would impose “low” pharmaceutical tariffs by the end of the month as an appetiser to proposed 200 per cent tariffs.

The announcement suggests that Australian pharmaceutical exporters can expect to be hit by tariffs much sooner than expected.

“Pharmaceuticals will be tariffed probably at the end of the month, and we’re going to start off with a low tariff and give the pharmaceutical companies a year or so to build, and then we’re going to make it a very high tariff, because we’ve got to move them,” US President Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

Last week, Trump said his administration would soon announce a ‘very high [tariff] rate, like 200 per cent’ on pharmaceutical products, set to take effect in a year’s time to give companies time to prepare.

"We're going to give [drug manufacturers] about a year, a year and a half to come in, and after that, they're going to be tariffed," Trump said last Wednesday.

While Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he was “very concerned” about the prospect of steep pharmaceutical tariffs last week, the initial time frame would have allowed time for industry to adapt.

“President Trump has said he will take some time to work out the pharmaceutical arrangements. And so that gives us the opportunity to do what we have been doing, which is engage with the industry, try and work out what they think their exposures are,” Chalmers told The Guardian’s Australian Politics podcast on Tuesday.

However, Trump’s announcement on Wednesday meant that Australian pharmaceutical exporters such as CSL would have significantly less time to prepare for incoming tariffs.

While other US tariffs were not set to have strong direct impacts on Australian industry, the US is a significant importer of Australian pharmaceutical products.

In March, ANZ economists noted that a whopping A$1.9 billion of Australia’s pharmaceutical exports went to the US in the year to December 2024 – 58.7 per cent of exports in that category.

The Albanese government has previously slammed the US tariff regime as “economic self harm.”

“We see these tariffs as unnecessary and self‑defeating; we’ve been pretty blunt about that, certainly blunt by the standards of international diplomacy. We’ve made it really clear that we think these tariffs are bad for the US, bad for Australia and bad for the global economy,” Chalmers said on Tuesday.

Trump appears committed to the tariffs, despite the economic harm they may cause. The pharmaceutical tariffs, he hopes, will force companies to base their operations in the US.

“And look, there are two ways you do it. You make money, or you have them move here so they don’t have to pay the tariff. Those are the two ways,” he said on Wednesday.

“The pharmaceutical companies are moving back to America, where they should be.”