Risk used to be something pharmaceutical companies responded to. Now it is something they have to design for.
For decades, pharma optimized for scale and cost. APIs and starting materials moved to India and China, manufacturing capabilities in Europe quietly disappeared, and intense price pressure became the unquestioned baseline. Then came the Suez blockage, COVID, tariffs, and conflict-driven disruptions. Each one was treated as a singular event to react to, not as a signal that the underlying network itself needed to change.
In this episode, Ellen Wood is joined by Stefan Gotthardt, fresh off moderating a panel at European LogiPharma 2026 in Vienna, to discuss what proactive resilience really looks like in pharma supply chains. They dig into why regionalization is becoming a structural strategy rather than a short-term fix, why pharma has to stop accepting price pressure as a given, and how the talent profile of the global head of supply chain is shifting as the industry borrows mindsets from FMCG and automotive.
In this episode:
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Why singular responses to each new crisis will never build a resilient network
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What regionalizing pharma actually requires, and why it cannot happen overnight
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Why the resiliency vs affordability debate starts at the wrong end
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The non-negotiable capabilities pharma supply chains will need by 2030
