AstraZeneca boss urges western drugmakers to move at ‘Chinese speed’

Pascal Soriot is AstraZeneca’s chief executive and the highest-paid leader of a FTSE 100 company. Photograph: Kent Nishimura/Reuters View image in fullscreen Pascal Soriot is AstraZeneca’s chief executive and the highest-paid leader of a FTSE 100 company. Photograph: Kent Nishimura/Reuters AstraZeneca boss urges western drugmakers to move at ‘Chinese speed’ Europe and US risk being outpaced on innovation, as happened in the car industry, warns Pascal Soriot AstraZeneca must operate at “Chinese speed” to ensure it doesn’t 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 sector must focus on increasing the speed of innovation. “We have to make sure we don’t fall behind,” said Soriot, speaking to reporters on Monday. “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 i t 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,” said Soriot. “Biology is biology.” AstraZeneca makes surprise U-turn with £300m pharma investment in UK Read more Despite confidence in growth prospects, Soriot, who is French, 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