Portugal Pharmaceutical Exports Jump 42.9% to €5 Billion in 2025

Portugal pharmaceutical exports climbed 42.9% in 2025 to €5.012 billion, a rise of €1,505 million. The jump landed in a year when the country’s total goods exports grew just 0.1%, or €72 million. Without the pharmaceutical increment, goods exports would have contracted.

The figures come from APIFARMA, the Portuguese pharmaceutical industry association, in a 17-slide indicator deck published on 2 September 2026. The deck draws on INE, Infarmed, IPCTN and Eurostat, and it describes a manufacturing base that has grown large enough to move the national accounts. In 2025 the sector produced €5.9 billion of output, about 1.9% of GDP, and exported €5.012 billion of medicines and raw materials. Exports now account for 6.3% of goods exports and 1.6% of GDP.

Portugal pharmaceutical exports: the 2025 jump

The most important line in the deck is about trade arithmetic. Pharmaceutical exports reached €5,012 million in 2025 while total goods exports rose only €72 million, lifting the sector’s share of goods exports to 6.3% from 1.4% in 2010. The sector ran a €522 million trade surplus against a national goods deficit of €33.1 billion, and its export coverage ratio reached 111.6%, compared with 70.5% for all goods. Cumulative export growth from 2010 to 2025 was 879% for pharmaceuticals and 112% for all goods.

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Three steep years after a flat decade

For a decade, exports sat between roughly €0.5 billion and €1.4 billion. They then jumped to €1.95 billion in 2022, €2.77 billion in 2023, €3.51 billion in 2024 and €5.01 billion in 2025, annual growth of 41%, 42%, 27% and 43%. Production followed the same kink: it stayed near €1.4 to €1.9 billion from 2010 to 2021, then rose to €2.33 billion in 2022, €3.38 billion in 2023, €4.22 billion in 2024 and €5.90 billion in 2025, a 40.1% gain in the final year. The volume measure agrees. The industrial production index for pharmaceuticals stood at 106.3 in 2025 against 98.9 for total industry, and averaged 107.2 in the first seven months of 2026 against 99.0.

The shift toward the United States

The destination mix has concentrated rather than diversified. The EU still takes 65.9% of exports, down from 68.8% in 2010. The structural change is the United States, up from 6.2% in 2010 to 25.8% in 2025. The other shares are small: Angola 1.1%, the United Kingdom 0.9%, Switzerland 0.8%, South Korea 0.4% and China 0.4%. In 2010 the non-EU list was led by Angola at 8.1%, Switzerland at 5.1% and Jordan at 2.0%. Two markets, the EU bloc and the United States, now take just over 90% of exports, and APIFARMA’s monthly notes put Germany alone at 47.4% of sector exports from January to October 2025.

Value added, research and trials

Gross value added reached €990.3 million in 2023, up 131.4% from €427.9 million in 2010, against 49.1% for the national economy. Value added per euro of production rose from 0.384 to 0.456. Business research and development spending reached €116.0 million in 2024, up from €77.9 million in 2010, and the sector’s research intensity runs 10.7 times the national average. Infarmed authorised 190 clinical trials in 2025, up from 105 in 2010.

What the deck leaves out

The deck offers no breakdown between originator, generic and biosimilar medicines, active pharmaceutical ingredients and contract manufacturing. It also carries no INFARMED pricing, reimbursement or waiting-time indicators, no 2024 gross value added, and it does not adjust 2025 Portugal pharmaceutical exports for tariff-related pull-forward, stock-building or intra-group transfer pricing. Contemporaneous press coverage has linked part of the 2025 bulge to front-loaded shipments around the US tariff shock, so 2025 is best treated as a peak year until 2026 annual data close.

The sector is now large enough that a bad export year shows up in the national goods-export print. That gives Lisbon a visible export champion to defend in European pharmaceutical industry debates and in US tariff diplomacy.

Indicators at a glance

Source: APIFARMA, Direção de Assuntos Económicos, Indústria Farmacêutica em Portugal, September 2026.