Pharma related exports have slumped by almost a quarter so far this year
Given the huge pharma investment here in recent years, most analysts believe exports may revive after this rollercoaster move. Photograph: Getty Images/iStockphotoIrish economic statistics are hard to understand at the best of times, but in recent years “difficult” has, in some cases, become “impossible”. Headline trends are always clear enough – the figures are the figures.
And so the latest export figures, which show goods exports were worth €16.7 billion in May, down €1.2 billion on the same month last year, require some investigation. It is part of a trend which has seen overall exports in the first five months down by 6 per cent on 2022, a sharp reversal of the upward trend in recent years. The fall is almost entirely due to a drop in exports to the United States, off a hefty 23 per cent in the January-May period.
A focus of big US pharmaceutical companies based here in recent years has been exporting product back to the American market, a trend criticised by some US economists as depriving Washington of valuable tax revenues. In most sectors, US companies in Ireland serve non-US markets, typically in Europe, but a lot of pharma exports go back to the US.
Given the huge pharma investment here in recent years, most analysts believe exports may revive after this rollercoaster move. But we just don’t know, mainly because the reasons behind the same increase are not entirely clear. With big pharma among Ireland’s major corporate taxpayers, this is a trend to monitor closely.