AstraZeneca must operate at “Chinese speed” to ensure it does not suffer the fate of the western automotive industry by losing out to more innovative rivals, the drug company’s boss has said.
The FTSE 100 company is watching the rise of China’s pharmaceutical industry closely and collaborating to take drugs to global markets, but its chief executive, Pascal Soriot, said the US and European pharmaceutical sectors must focus on increasing the speed of innovation.
“We have to make sure we don’t fall behind,” Soriot said. “What we are learning ourselves is we have to move much faster. We always talk about Chinese speed in our company, and we want to operate in Chinese speed.”
AstraZeneca said on Monday it was confident of hitting its growth targets for 2030, when it expects to make $80bn (£60bn) in annual sales, up from $59bn last year. The British company, headquartered in Cambridge, reported revenues of £30.7bn in the first half of 2026, a 6% increase on the same period a year earlier at constant exchange rates.
Soriot, the highest-paid FTSE 100 chief executive, said the pipeline of new drugs from the company was “unmatched”, putting it on course to hit the growth targets in 2030 and beyond despite the surprise failure of Wainua, one of its major heart disease drug prospects, in clinical trials earlier this month.
“We have to accept to fail some of the time,” Soriot said. “Biology is biology.”
Despite confidence in growth prospects, French-born Soriot acknowledged that dominant pharmaceutical companies in Europe and the US needed to be aware of the potential challenge from Chinese competitors.
He cited the automotive industry as an example, where western companies had predominantly focused on making cars with petrol engines, leaving the way clear for Chinese companies to dominate electric car sales.
“Chinese companies were focused completely on electric vehicles and batteries and those kinds of technologies,” Soriot said, adding that Chinese pharmaceutical companies were investing heavily in equivalent novel technologies such as antibody drug conjugates, which deliver chemotherapy agents directly to cancer cells, and cell therapy, in which live cells are injected into the body to help fight diseases.
Sorit also played down the risk to jobs posed by AI, which he said could increase the speed of drug development, particularly in the design of trial protocols.
He said he believed AI tools would help improve productivity in the pharma industry, allowing for economic growth rather than meaning fewer people would be needed.
“This story about AI killing jobs is a bit of a fake story,” Soriot said. “I can tell you it makes me faster and smarter,” he added, of his experience interacting with AI tools.
Soriot said that AstraZeneca would engage with the UK government under its new leader, Andy Burnham, to seek clarity on a deal with the US that could result in the NHS paying billions of pounds more for medicines.
He said it was too early to say whether the change in leadership would have any effect on the deal – struck under pressure from Donald Trump, who threatened to impose heavy tariffs on UK drug exports to the US – which analysis has suggested could lead to 229,000 excess deaths in England.
“We need to understand their priorities and where the priorities are,” Soriot said. “You have to establish your priorities and then fund them.”
