GSK’s dealmaking will be “cautious and disciplined” under the current trade war, but the pharma will focus on looking for “opportunities created” amid these tensions, according to CEO Emma Walmsley. The company also reported a 4% earnings bump for the quarter.
GSK is choosing to look on the bright side of President Donald Trump’s trade war, focusing on “opportunities created,” even as tariffs escalate already-fraught geopolitical tensions.
“I’m going to be more optimistic,” CEO Emma Walmsley said in the company’s first quarter earnings call on Wednesday. She noted that even as the Trump administration singles out China as its biggest biotech threat, GSK continues to “look at the opportunities out of China,” pointing to “several good deals.”
In December 2024, for instance, GSK inked a potential $1 billion deal with Shanghai-based DualityBio to license a novel antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) against a yet-undisclosed stomach cancer target. A year earlier, in December 2023, the pharma likewise entered into an ADC-focused partnership with Hansoh Pharma, putting $1.7 billion on the line.
“About half” of GSK’s pipeline comes from dealmaking, Walmsley said during the call, while the other half is driven by its internal research efforts. “Since 2018, we’ve increased our investment in R&D by nearly 90%,” she added, “but we want to keep complementing that with [business development].”
“We want to engage, we seek to move agilely, we are always focused on returns—and obviously you have to take a cautious and disciplined view in the current environment, but we still see opportunity here,” she added.
Walmsley stands on the optimistic side, particularly as concerns grow around potential dealmaking problems that Trump’s trade war could pose. Roche CEO Thomas Schinecker, for instance, said during the pharma’s Q1 report last week that “it will be more difficult to make financial sense of any M&A deals” if tariffs get in the way.
On the numbers side of the Q1 earnings call GSK reported that it made £7.52 billion in the quarter—approximately $10 billion—a 4% year-on-year increase. Its specialty medicines business emerged with the strongest performance, driven by its HIV portfolio, which grew 7% year-on-year to bring in £1.7 billion (nearly $2.3 billion).
Its shingles vaccine Shingrix brought in £867 million (more than $1.1 billion) in the quarter, down 7% from the same period a year prior. GSK attributed the sales hit to the “slowdown in the pace of penetration” in the U.S., particularly in “harder-to-reach unvaccinated consumers.”
The company’s vaccine division was a major topic of conversation on the earnings call. The pharma in its Q1 report revealed that it expects its vaccine portfolio to decrease by a low single-digit percentage this year, driven primarily by lower expected demand for Shingrix and its respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) shot Arexvy.
One link to this downward forecast is macro-headwinds in the U.S., given the notable vaccine criticism from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To that point, Walmsley stands by vaccine technology, saying that “there is no better benefit than stopping disease before it starts.” Nevertheless, she said that “parents have questions, and [pharma] should answer those responsibly and transparently.”
But for the most part, she said, GSK is insulated from Kennedy’s current rhetoric on vaccines, in particular the safety of childhood immunizations. “Pediatric vaccination is a relatively small part of our business in America,” Walmsley pointed out. Its highest-growth shots—Shingrix and Arexvy—are indicated for adults, as are its upcoming vaccines.
