Roche Lost 5% on the Franc. Its CEO Is Spending $50bn in America Anyway

EBM Newsdesk Analysis

Basel, 24 April 2026 — Roche reported first-quarter sales of CHF 14.7 billion ($18.7 billion) on Wednesday, down 5% year-on-year as the Swiss franc’s continued strength eroded reported revenue across every major market outside Switzerland. On a constant-currency basis, sales were actually up 6%. CEO Thomas Schinecker dismissed the headline number as a “question on how you look at the reporting” and used the same earnings call to publicly reaffirm Roche’s $50 billion US investment plan announced in April 2025 — a five-year commitment to expand manufacturing, R&D and headcount across Indiana, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and California, creating 12,000 new American jobs. The line that mattered most to European business strategists was almost throwaway: “We spend most of our money in the U.S., and we have most of our debt in the U.S.” That sentence is the European industrial story of 2026 in microcosm.

What Schinecker described in functional CFO terms is the structural choice now facing every large European multinational with US revenue exposure — and the answer Roche has reached is increasingly the answer the entire continent’s blue-chip industrial base is reaching.

The Currency Squeeze

The Swiss franc fell 12% against the US dollar in 2025 and is down a further 1% so far in 2026 — but on a multi-year basis the franc has appreciated meaningfully against most major currencies, including the euro and sterling. For a Swiss-headquartered, dollar-revenue-heavy business like Roche, this creates the translation effect that punishes reported earnings in francs even when the underlying business is healthy. Roche’s pharmaceutical division grew 7% in constant currency. Diagnostics grew 3%. The US business — the company’s most important market — grew 5% in constant currency, driven by asthma medicine Xolair, hemophilia drug Hemlibra, and blood cancer treatment Polivy.

In other words, the operational performance is solid. The franc is the problem.

The American Answer

Roche’s solution is to make itself, increasingly, an American company in everything but headquarters. The $50 billion plan announced last year — and visibly reaffirmed this week — will take Roche’s US footprint to 24 sites across eight states, including a new gene therapy manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania and a continuous glucose monitoring facility in Indiana. Once the new manufacturing comes online, Roche has stated it will export more medicines from the US than it imports. That is, structurally, the company hedging itself against both currency exposure and Trump administration tariff risk in a single move.

Roche is not alone. Novartis announced a $23 billion US investment plan in 2025. Sanofi has expanded US biologics manufacturing. AstraZeneca has been openly discussing increased US capital allocation to manage tariff and currency exposure. The pattern across European pharma is now clear: where the dollar revenue base justifies it, manufacturing, R&D and debt are migrating west.

The Strategic Question

For European business readers, the discomfort runs deeper than one company’s earnings call. If Europe’s most successful companies — pharma, luxury, autos, industrials — increasingly site their highest-value capital expenditure in the US to manage currency and tariff exposure, the long-term consequence is a hollowing out of European industrial strategic depth, even as the headquarters stay in Basel, Paris or Frankfurt. Tax bases stay European. Boards stay European. But the manufacturing, the research jobs, and the debt covenants migrate.

The counter-argument from Roche, Novartis and others is straightforward: companies don’t have a duty to optimise around currencies they don’t control or political regimes they can’t influence. Schinecker’s comment was made by a CEO acting rationally on behalf of shareholders. The deeper question is whether Brussels and the major European capitals have a coherent answer when the rational shareholder choice is to move capital out.

So far, they don’t.

What Comes Next

Roche maintained its full-year 2026 guidance — mid-single-digit sales growth, high single-digit core EPS growth at constant exchange rates. The company’s recent acquisitions — 89bio for $3.5 billion in October 2025, Poseida Therapeutics for $1 billion in November 2024 — have been almost entirely US-anchored. The next earnings cycle will determine whether Wednesday’s franc-versus-dollar narrative was a one-quarter wobble or the new permanent shape of Swiss multinational reporting.

For European policymakers watching, the question is no longer whether European industrial capital will continue migrating to the US under current conditions. It is how much, and for how long, before the structural rebalancing becomes politically intolerable in Brussels, Berlin and Paris. Roche’s Wednesday earnings call was, in that sense, less a Q1 report than a quiet warning shot.

Related Analysis

• Why European pharma is choosing the dollar over the euro
• Trump’s tariff regime and the new European corporate playbook
• The Swiss franc’s strength is reshaping every Swiss multinational