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Reform UK conference draws Vodafone, Heathrow and JCB

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Reform UK conference draws Vodafone, Heathrow and JCB

Some of Britain’s biggest companies will descend on Reform UK’s national conference this week as the party intensifies its efforts to win over business leaders and strengthen its economic credibility.

Vodafone, EE, Heathrow and JCB are among the businesses attending or running events at the three-day gathering, which opens at the National Exhibition Centre on the outskirts of Birmingham on Thursday.

For the first time, the party is staging a dedicated business day, which it says will place “the business community at the heart of the programme”, offering attendees access to Reform’s leadership.

At least one name on the guest list already has form with the party. JCB, the digger maker chaired by Lord Bamford, donated £200,000 to Reform UK alongside an identical sum for the Conservatives, with Bamford saying both parties “believe in small business”.

Others are keen to stress that turning up is not the same as signing up. A spokesman for Heathrow said the airport had a long history of constructive engagement across the political spectrum. “Like many businesses, from airlines to pubs and banks to supermarkets, it is common practice to sponsor events at party conferences to engage policymakers and ensure they better understand the needs of consumers and the economy,” he added.

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Champagne out, corporate packages in

Business Matters has previously reported that Reform almost doubled some commercial costs for this year’s conference, dropping earlier promises of free champagne and custom cocktail naming rights in favour of an event much closer in feel to a traditional party conference.

The price of some packages has climbed as the party looks to woo wealthy backers and boost its coffers. A platinum ticket has risen from £2,500 per person to £3,000 plus VAT, buying a champagne breakfast with Nigel Farage, fast-track entry and access to a special lounge. Insiders have previously described the changes as “a necessary part of our professionalisation, even if it is a bit more boring”.

The policy pitch to employers

Reform arrives in Birmingham with a policy offer aimed squarely at the businesses it is courting. The party has proposed scrapping the contentious increase in employers’ national insurance contributions for workers who are British nationals. That rise, announced in Rachel Reeves’s October 2024 Budget, lifted the employer rate to 15 per cent and cut the threshold at which firms start paying to £5,000 a year, a change the OECD found gave the UK the biggest employer tax rise in the developed world.

The party has also proposed cutting VAT for the hospitality sector to 10 per cent, half the current standard rate of 20 per cent.

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Momentum since May

The stepped-up courtship of business follows a run of electoral success. Reform racked up hundreds of council wins in May’s elections, beat Labour into second place in the contest for the Welsh Senedd and finished joint second at Holyrood.

The party has been professionalising its Westminster operation too. Earlier this year it opened the doors of its Millbank headquarters, on the banks of the Thames in London, to public affairs professionals, an event that doubled as a pitch to agencies and featured a speech by Robert Jenrick, the party’s Treasury spokesman.

Not everyone believes the courtship should go unchallenged. Senior Labour figures have urged firms to scrutinise Reform’s economic plans more closely, with the Labour MP Liam Byrne saying companies are right to be concerned about how the party’s promises would be paid for. Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice has rejected that criticism, insisting the party would restore fiscal discipline and cut regulation.

For the companies heading to the NEC this week, the calculation is the one Heathrow set out: engaging policymakers at party conferences is simply part of doing business.

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Jamie Young

Jamie Young

Jamie Young is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, covering SME finance, employment law and Westminster policy since 2016. He has reported on every Budget and Autumn Statement since 2018, helped make sense of the ‘covid era’ and the bounce-back loan scheme from launch through the fraud investigations, and broke the magazine’s coverage of the 2024 late-payment reforms. He joined Business Matters straight from completing his BA in Administration from Exeter University and is NCTJ-qualified. Reach him at jyoung@cbmeg.co.uk

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New York out-migration tied to high taxes, debt and crime, Pataki says

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New York out-migration tied to high taxes, debt and crime, Pataki says

New York isn’t just losing residents — it’s losing some of the people who help power its economy.

As New York continues to see residents move to other states, former New York Gov. George Pataki is warning that entrepreneurs, financial leaders and major donors are increasingly heading for the exits.

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Pataki joined FOX Business’ Cheryl Casone on “Mornings with Maria” to discuss the state’s outmigration, its business climate and the policies he believes are pushing residents and job creators elsewhere.

Former New York Governor George Pataki.

Former New York Gov. George Pataki weighs in on New York’s out-migration and business climate. (Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg / Getty Images)

“You know, it’s just almost tragic to see the loss of people, not just people, but people who create jobs, who donate to hospitals and museums, the best of New York, the people who have made New York the entrepreneurial and financial center are just leaving,” Pataki said.

The former governor argued that New York risks weakening its position as the nation’s financial center as companies expand their workforces elsewhere, pointing to the growing pull of lower-tax states such as Texas.

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“We fought hard to keep it the financial capital of the world. It still is for the moment. But if we continue these tax-and-spend and soft-on-crime policies, it’s just going to get worse,” he said.

NYC-AREA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE CEO BLASTS MAMDANI GROCERY PLAN AS ‘DISASTROUS’ AMID LEGAL FIGHT

Pataki also warned that additional tax increases and rising debt could deepen the state’s challenges and drive more residents away. Still, he said New York has the ability to reverse course.

“We’re going to end up not just with the highest taxes in the country, but with unsustainable debt, with more people leaving,” Pataki said. “We’re not doing great right now, but New York is New York. It’s very resilient. It still has great people. We put in place the right policies and it will come roaring back. So in that sense, I’m an optimist.”

FLORIDA CHAMBER CEO: COMPANIES EYE SUNSHINE STATE ‘FROM ALL OVER THE COUNTRY’ AFTER VIRAL MAMDANI BILLBOARD

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Microsoft Store Down? Outage Reports Surge, Marking a Third Microsoft Service Disruption This Monday Alone

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Introducing Microsoft Surface Laptop 3

Users of the Microsoft Store began reporting access problems starting at approximately 12:17 p.m. Eastern time Monday, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector, marking the third Microsoft service to draw user complaints within roughly 90 minutes on the same day.

Downdetector, an Ookla-owned platform that monitors more than 12,000 online services worldwide, posted on X shortly after the reports began surfacing. “User reports indicate problems with Microsoft Store since 12:17 PM EDT,” the account wrote, encouraging affected users to share how the disruption was impacting them under the hashtag #MicrosoftStoreDown. Separate outage-tracking service Entireweb similarly logged elevated activity for the Microsoft Store, recording 56 user reports over the preceding 24-hour period as of Monday, with six of those reports arriving within the final hour before its status check.

Monday’s Microsoft Store reports followed closely on the heels of two earlier disruptions affecting other Microsoft products the same day. Users had reported problems with Microsoft Outlook beginning around 11:53 a.m. Eastern time, and separate reports tracked by the online forum DesignTAXI Community indicated that broader Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook specifically, began showing elevated outage report volumes as early as 11:33 a.m. Eastern time Monday. The clustering of complaints across multiple Microsoft products within a relatively narrow window raised questions among affected users about whether the issues stemmed from a shared underlying cause, though Microsoft had not issued a public statement definitively linking the incidents as of Monday afternoon.

Microsoft’s broader cloud infrastructure, built primarily on its Azure platform, underpins a wide range of the company’s consumer and enterprise products, meaning that problems originating in shared backend systems can sometimes manifest as simultaneous disruptions across seemingly unrelated services. That dynamic played out dramatically during a major Microsoft outage in 2021, when a Domain Name System, or DNS, networking issue took down Microsoft’s homepage, Xbox and Office services, login pages, and even the company’s own status pages simultaneously, according to a contemporaneous report from TechCrunch. In that incident, Microsoft’s cloud service Azure also went offline, causing cascading outages across other websites and services that depend on Azure’s infrastructure, before the company confirmed the issue had been mitigated roughly seven hours after it began.

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As of Monday afternoon, StatusGator’s monitoring of the broader Microsoft 365 apps category showed the service listed as operational, with only four user-submitted reports logged over the preceding 24-hour period as of a status check conducted shortly after 12:30 p.m. Eastern time, a discrepancy that illustrates how quickly outage-reporting metrics can shift and how different monitoring services can produce varying pictures of the same underlying situation depending on their data sources and update frequency.

Downdetector’s outage-tracking methodology relies on a combination of user-submitted complaints and automated web traffic monitoring rather than direct access to a company’s internal systems, meaning reported spikes in activity do not always indicate a complete platform-wide failure. Disruptions can instead reflect issues affecting a specific region, a particular version of an app or service, or a coincidental cluster of unrelated individual account problems. Even so, the near-simultaneous emergence of complaints across three separate Microsoft products in a single morning represents an unusual pattern that has drawn attention from users monitoring the company’s service status throughout the day.

Microsoft’s official Azure status page and its dedicated Microsoft 365 service health dashboard remain the most authoritative sources for confirming whether the company has formally acknowledged any of Monday’s reported issues. As of this report, Microsoft had not issued a public statement addressing the Microsoft Store outage reports specifically, and the company did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding whether Monday’s disruptions across Outlook, Microsoft Store and broader Microsoft 365 services were connected to a common underlying cause.

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NSE records Rs 39,718 cr turnover in closing auction session on first index rebalancing day

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NSE records Rs 39,718 cr turnover in closing auction session on first index rebalancing day
The National Stock Exchange of India Ltd (NSE) on Monday recorded a turnover of Rs 39,718 crore in the Closing Auction Session (CAS), accounting for 22 per cent of its total cash market turnover, on the first index rebalancing day since the mechanism was introduced earlier this month.

The exchange commanded a 99.9 per cent market share in the CAS, with more than 98,000 unique investors participating in the session, NSE said in a statement.

The turnover in Monday’s session was around 42 times the turnover recorded in the previous trading session.

The session coincided with the implementation of the MSCI August 2026 Index Review, which took effect at the close of trading on Monday. It was the first major index rebalancing after CAS went live in the Indian capital markets.

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Index rebalancing days typically witness heavy trading towards the close as index funds, exchange-traded funds and other passive investors realign their portfolios based on changes in benchmark indices.


NSE said the strong turnover in the CAS demonstrated that index funds and passive investors executed their rebalancing trades through the mechanism.
Monday also marked the completion of one month of the closing auction session. During the first month, NSE recorded a cumulative CAS turnover of around Rs 63,000 crore, with a market share of 98.2 per cent.The CAS is a call auction mechanism used to determine the closing price of stocks in the cash segment on which derivative contracts are available.

Under the mechanism, buy and sell interest at the close of the market is aggregated into a single price discovery process, aimed at enhancing transparency, integrity and fairness in determining closing prices.

The mechanism was implemented from August 3 following the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s (Sebi) decision to introduce the closing auction session in the Indian capital markets.

NSE said the CAS brings the Indian market closer to global best practices for closing price discovery.

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10 Motivational Lionel Messi Quotes That Define His Legendary Career as He Retires From Argentina Now

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Jose Mourinho has been sacked by Tottenham
Lionel Messi is leaving Barcelona
10 Motivational Lionel Messi Quotes That Define His Legendary Career as He Retires From Argentina Now

Lionel Messi’s announcement Monday that he is retiring from the Argentina national team closes out one of the most decorated international careers in soccer history, and it has renewed attention on the words the 39-year-old has used over the years to describe the mindset behind that success.

Messi, who scored 124 goals in 203 appearances for Argentina and led the country to the 2022 World Cup title, has spoken publicly for decades about the discipline, humility and love of the game that shaped his rise from a boy in Rosario, Argentina, diagnosed with a growth hormone deficiency to becoming widely regarded as the greatest player of his generation. Compiled from interviews and public remarks over the course of his career, here are 10 of the quotes most often cited as capturing that mindset.

  1. “I start early and I stay late, day after day, year after year. It took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success.” Frequently cited by outlets including SpanishMama and Addicted2Success, the line reflects Messi’s insistence that his rise, though it appeared meteoric to outside observers, was built on years of unglamorous repetition rather than raw talent alone.
  2. “In football as in watchmaking, talent and elegance mean nothing without rigour and precision.” Listed among Messi’s most quoted lines by BrainyQuote and Jobs In Football, the comparison underscores a recurring theme in his public remarks: that technical gifts require exacting discipline to translate into consistent results.
  3. “Money is not a motivating factor. Money doesn’t thrill me or make me play better because there are benefits to being wealthy. I’m just happy with a ball at my feet.” According to BrainyQuote, Messi added that if he weren’t paid to play professionally, he would “willingly play for nothing,” a sentiment that has circulated widely as evidence of his stated attachment to the sport itself rather than its financial rewards.
  4. “You have to fight to reach your dream. You have to sacrifice and work hard for it.” This line, also catalogued by BrainyQuote, has become one of the most frequently referenced Messi quotes in motivational contexts, distilling his broader public message about the relationship between ambition and effort.
  5. “Whether it’s a goal, or winning a game, I’m never satisfied.” Cited by Addicted2Success among quotes reflecting Messi’s approach to sustained excellence, the remark speaks to the restless mentality that teammates and coaches have often pointed to when describing his longevity at the top of the sport.
  6. “You have to keep working hard and playing well because people will start to forget what you have done before if you don’t.” According to Jobs In Football’s compilation of widely attributed Messi remarks, the quote reflects an awareness that reputation in professional sports is rarely permanent, requiring continued performance rather than reliance on past achievements.
  7. “I try to use pressure to help me in every game. Pressure helps me do things to the best of my ability. I like it. I don’t feel pressure; quite the contrary, because I always enjoy what I’m doing and that’s playing football.” This more extended remark, catalogued by Addicted2Success, offers insight into how Messi has publicly framed the intense scrutiny that came with captaining Argentina through multiple World Cup campaigns.
  8. “Every year I try to grow as a player and not get stuck in a rut. I try to improve my game in every way possible.” Listed by SpanishMama among Messi’s most repeated public statements, the quote reflects the emphasis on continuous improvement that outlets covering his career have frequently cited as central to his approach.
  9. “I am more worried about being a good person than being the best footballer in the world.” According to a compilation published by The Strive, this remark has been widely shared as evidence of how Messi has publicly positioned his character and personal values relative to his athletic accomplishments.
  10. “When you lose, you get up, you make mistakes and you learn.” Included among the widely cited quotes compiled by Jobs In Football, the line reflects a theme Messi returned to repeatedly across his career, including in the aftermath of earlier disappointments with Argentina before the team’s eventual 2022 World Cup triumph.

Taken together, the quotes reflect a consistent public message Messi maintained across more than two decades in the sport: that sustained success depends less on natural gift than on discipline, humility and a genuine enjoyment of the game itself. As tributes to his international career continue to circulate following Monday’s retirement announcement, those themes are likely to remain central to how fans, teammates and commentators remember his two-decade run with the Argentina national team.

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FTC reportedly suing Amazon over ad practices, shares fall

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FTC reportedly suing Amazon over ad practices, shares fall

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Employers Are Making Job Candidates Jump Through Hoops to Prove They’re Real

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Employers Are Making Job Candidates Jump Through Hoops to Prove They’re Real

There’s a new frontier in job interviews and it goes something like this: Remove your Zoom background and pan your camera around the room. Now, could you please wave your hand in front of your face?

The ubiquity of AI-assisted answering—not to mention the risk of hiring candidates who might be lying about where they live, or even working for North Korea—has companies upping their screening tactics. They want to ensure the people they’re hiring really know what they’re talking about and are who they say they are.

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Nomura Value Fund Q2 2026 Portfolio Activity

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Asset Allocation Insights - March 2026

Nomura Value Fund Q2 2026 Portfolio Activity

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Microsoft Azure Down? Outage Reports Surge, Capping a Fourth Microsoft Service Disruption This Monday Alone

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Introducing Microsoft Surface Laptop 3

Users of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure began reporting access problems starting at approximately 12:45 p.m. Eastern time Monday, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector, marking the fourth Microsoft product to draw user complaints within roughly two hours on the same day.

Downdetector posted on X shortly after the reports began surfacing. “User reports indicate problems with Microsoft Azure since 12:45 PM EDT,” the account wrote, asking affected users to describe how the disruption was impacting them under the hashtag #MicrosoftAzureDown. The Azure reports followed earlier Monday complaints involving Microsoft Outlook, which began drawing attention around 11:53 a.m. Eastern time, and Microsoft Store, which saw a similar spike in user reports beginning at 12:17 p.m., raising the possibility that Monday’s cluster of disruptions across multiple Microsoft products traced back to a shared underlying cause within the company’s infrastructure.

Azure serves as the backbone of much of Microsoft’s broader product ecosystem, hosting the cloud infrastructure that supports services including Microsoft 365, Outlook, Xbox Live and countless third-party applications and websites built on top of Microsoft’s cloud platform. That interconnected architecture means disruptions originating within Azure’s core systems can cascade outward, producing what appear to be simultaneous, seemingly unrelated outages across multiple consumer-facing products at once.

Separate monitoring services offered a mixed picture of Azure’s status heading into Monday afternoon. Outage tracker 503Radar reported that Azure was operating normally as of 11:39 a.m. UTC Monday, before the reported issues began, and noted that the platform’s most recent confirmed outage had occurred Aug. 28, when a multiple-service disruption affecting West U.S. regions took roughly 23 hours to resolve. StatusGator, meanwhile, reported that a related product, Azure DevOps, was experiencing a partial outage as of Monday afternoon, with confirmed issues affecting pipeline services in Canada and artifact services in the United States, even as other Azure DevOps components remained listed as operational. StatusGator separately logged 14 user-submitted outage reports for the core Azure platform over the preceding 24-hour period as of an earlier Monday morning check.

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Microsoft’s Azure platform has experienced a series of shorter regional disruptions in recent weeks, according to 503Radar’s incident tracking, including an issue affecting Southeast Asia on Aug. 25 that took nearly 13 hours to resolve, and a separate Azure Portal access problem affecting Australian regions on Aug. 14 that lasted more than 12 hours. Those incidents, along with the more recent Aug. 27-28 disruption in West U.S. regions, suggest Azure has faced a more active-than-usual stretch of regional service issues heading into Monday’s reported problems.

Microsoft maintains an official Azure status page, accessible at azure.status.microsoft, which the company updates in real time to reflect the health of its cloud services and to publish post-incident reviews following major outages with broad customer impact. According to Microsoft’s own documentation on the Azure Service Health system, the company distinguishes between incidents severe enough to prevent customers from accessing the status page directly, in which case Microsoft attempts direct customer communication, and broader service issues affecting undetermined numbers of customers or regions, which the company addresses through public status updates rather than individually targeted outreach.

As of Monday afternoon, Microsoft had not issued a public statement specifically linking the day’s reported issues across Outlook, Microsoft Store and Azure to a single root cause, and the company’s official status channels had not confirmed a major, broad-impact incident matching the scale suggested by the clustered Downdetector reports. Outage-tracking methodologies used by services like Downdetector rely on crowdsourced user complaints and automated web traffic monitoring rather than direct visibility into Microsoft’s internal systems, meaning reported spikes in activity do not necessarily confirm a company-wide failure, even when they cluster closely together in time.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding the reported Azure disruption or whether it was connected to the earlier Outlook and Microsoft Store outage reports logged earlier the same day. Affected users have been encouraged to monitor Microsoft’s official Azure status page directly for the most authoritative and up-to-date information regarding the platform’s operational status.

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A Texas Banking Billionaire and His Children Are Locked in a Bitter Succession Drama

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A Texas Banking Billionaire and His Children Are Locked in a Bitter Succession Drama

A family battle over a billionaire’s fortune, from boats and a jet to Dallas Cowboys tickets, is rankling the board of a small regional bank in

Texas

Texas banking veteran Gerald J. Ford is ensnarled in a legal fight with some of his adult children over a large stake in Hilltop Holdings

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-0.18%

decrease; down pointing triangle, the $2.2 billion financial-services holding company he forged. Four of Ford’s children—including son Jeremy, who took over as chair from Ford in 2025—are suing to wrest away control of their father’s more-than-26% stake in Hilltop, worth some $600 million.

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Trump to announce new drug pricing deals with drugmakers: Report

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Trump to announce new drug pricing deals with drugmakers: Report

U.S. President Donald Trump makes an announcement about lowering the cost of drug prices, at the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., Dec. 19, 2025.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Nearly a dozen drugmakers are slated to ink deals with President Donald Trump on Monday to voluntarily sell their medications for less, MS NOW reported, building on his push to link the nation’s drug prices to cheaper ones abroad.

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It is unclear which companies will be included, according to the MS NOW report. Trump is scheduled to make an announcement on healthcare affordability at 3:00 p.m. ET on Monday.

Over the past year, the Trump administration has reached drug pricing deals with 17 pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, as part of its “most favored nation” policy. Trump signed an executive order in May 2025 to revive that policy, calling for prices to be increased outside of the U.S. and to “end global freeloading.”

The reported deals would add to the White House’s efforts to spotlight healthcare affordability ahead of the midterm elections. 

Bloomberg reported last week that the drugmakers on Monday are expected to agree to provide discounts on outpatient drugs to state Medicaid programs so that prices states pay align with what companies charge in foreign countries. Participation by state Medicaid programs is optional. 

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In exchange, those companies will be exempt from pilot programs mandating similar discounts in Medicare, Bloomberg reported. 

Medicaid already receives steep discounts from companies under federal law, so it’s unclear how the new deals will impact what patients pay out of pocket. 

The “most favored nation” deals that have been signed with the Trump administration have already impacted the commercial strategies, bottom lines and manufacturing pipelines of major pharmaceutical companies. 

To insulate themselves from future tariff threats, drugmakers are spending billions of dollars to bring manufacturing capabilities back to the U.S. Companies are also drastically expanding direct-to-consumer channels for their products, including by offering their medicines on the president’s TrumpRx portal. Lower prices in the U.S. are weighing on bottom lines, with manufacturers like Novo Nordisk saying that it will take time for prescription volumes to offset the revenue dip. 

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U.S. prescription drug prices on average are nearly three times higher than they are overseas, according to a 2024 study by Rand Corp. Prices for branded drugs were more than four times higher, the report found.

The trade association PhRMA, which represents many major pharma companies, has previously said that most-favored nation pricing isn’t the best way to lower drug costs for Americans and instead blamed pharmacy benefit managers for the price disparity.

The U.S. is the single most important market for many drugmakers, regardless of their home country. Despite being based across the Atlantic, European pharma companies are heavily exposed to the U.S. market, with half of the 10 largest companies on the continent generating a majority of their sales in the U.S.

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