Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2673 actions· ✨ 90 recent

On 16 December 2025 the European Commission adopted in Strasbourg the Proposal for a Regulation establishing a framework of measures for strengthening the Union's biotechnology and biomanufacturing sectors particularly in the area of health — the "European Biotech Act" (COM(2025) 1022 final). The proposal is the third axis of the EU's pharma/biotech industrial-policy stack alongside the Critical Medicines Act (filed: 2025-03-11-eu-critical-medicines-act-proposal) and the US Section 232 pharmaceuticals track (filed: 2026-04-02-us-section-232-pharmaceutical-proclamation), and is explicitly designed to keep biotech innovation, investment, and biomanufacturing capacity in Europe in the face of US/China competitiveness pressure. Core instruments: (1) statutory recognition for "Health Biotechnology Strategic Projects" (HBSPs) and "High-Impact" HBSPs eligible for accelerated permitting via a single national contact point, plus administrative/technical/ financial support; (2) regulatory sandboxes for novel biotech and biomanufacturing modalities; (3) a 12-month Supplementary Protection Certificate extension for qualifying biotech and advanced-therapy medicines; (4) targeted simplification of existing EU life-sciences acquis (clinical-trial timelines, risk-proportionate requirements); (5) an EU Health Biotechnology Investment Pilot co-developed with the EIB Group, paired with a EUR 10bn 2026-27 EIB-Commission financing initiative; (6) biosecurity safeguards including a list of "biotechnology products of concern" and mandatory built-in screening for benchtop nucleic-acid synthesis devices. A second tranche covering industrial biotechnologies and biomanufacturing outside health is expected later in 2026.

On 9 December 2025, Saudi Arabia's Local Content & Government Procurement Authority (LCGPA) issued the December 2025 batch expansion of its Mandatory List — a binding instrument requiring government entities, state-owned enterprises, and sub-contractors to source listed products exclusively from Saudi domestic manufacturers meeting the LCGPA-defined local-content threshold. The December 2025 expansion brings the list to approximately 1,444 national products across 16 sectors, effective 1 March 2026, with LCGPA targeting a total of approximately 2,000 products by end-2026. The Mandatory List operationalises the demand-side layer of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 / National Industrial Strategy (NIS) industrial-policy stack, directly restricting foreign-supplier access to Saudi annual government-procurement budgets estimated at SAR 500 billion+ across central government, Aramco, PIF-portfolio entities, Ma'aden, SEC, STC, Saudi Post, and Saudi Railway.

Bangladesh's Council of Advisers, chaired by Chief Adviser Prof. Muhammad Yunus, approved the National Logistics Policy 2025 on 6 November 2025 at its 47th meeting, replacing the annulled 2024 Awami League-era logistics policy. The framework spans 11 chapters and establishes a technology-driven, integrated, sustainable logistics ecosystem aimed at positioning Bangladesh as a leading regional trade and logistics hub by 2050. Two-tier governance architecture: a National Logistics Council (led by the Chief Adviser) for top-level coordination, and a National Logistics Development and Coordination Committee (led by the Chief Adviser's Principal Secretary) for implementation oversight across multimodal hubs, economic zones, international corridors, airports, river ports, sea ports, and land ports.

The Chongqing Municipal People's Government General Office issued "Several Measures for Chongqing's Full-Chain Support of High-Quality Innovative Drug Development" (Yu Fu Ban Fa [2025] No. 56) on 2025-11-01, a 25-point package of regulatory-fast-track and procurement-support measures for the municipal biopharma sector. It targets 1-3 newly approved innovative drugs per year through 2027 (10 total) and the cultivation of 3 pharmaceutical-innovation industrial complexes, 3 high-level innovation platforms, and 3 innovative-drug industry clusters. No direct subsidy or tax-incentive amount is disclosed in the published text — the package is operational (compressed clinical-trial and registration timelines, guaranteed hospital procurement) rather than a cash grant.

On 28 October 2025, Saudi Arabia's Local Content & Government Procurement Authority (LCGPA) signed five localization and knowledge-transfer agreements on the sidelines of the Global Health Exhibition 2025, covering domestic manufacture and technology transfer for the biologic drugs etanercept and adalimumab (both used to treat chronic inflammatory / autoimmune conditions) and for orthopedic trauma implants. The adalimumab agreement was signed separately with Boston Oncology Arabia and Tabuk Pharmaceuticals. Boston Oncology's own disclosure of its adalimumab/ etanercept agreement (announced 4 November 2025) put the combined economic impact at over SAR 1.2 billion in cumulative GDP contribution and approximately 500 direct jobs, with production sited at its Sudair Industrial City facility (USFDA/EMA/SFDA-standard). Global Trade Alert's tracking of the same state act records seven counterparties in total (Boston Oncology, Tabuk Pharmaceuticals, Rameem Medical, Bio Vision, Sudair Pharma, Almana Company, and an additional pharma manufacturer), consistent with LCGPA's practice of bundling several related product-localization signings into one event.

On 26 September 2025, Japan's Minister of Finance Katsunobu Kato announced the establishment of the Japan Strategic Investment Facility, a JBIC-administered financing vehicle operationalising the USD 550bn investment pledge from the July 2025 US-Japan tariff and investment agreement. The facility launched 1 October 2025 and runs through March 2029, supporting the overseas expansion of Japanese companies across nine economic-security sectors: semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, steel, shipbuilding, critical minerals, aviation, energy, automobiles, and AI/quantum technology. Funding draws on three sources — dollar-denominated JBIC bonds, yen-denominated Japanese government loans to JBIC, and a "supplemental" transfer from Japan's USD 1.324tn foreign-currency reserves — with private-sector loans and NEXI-backed loan guarantees supplementing JBIC's own financing.

South Korea's National Assembly passed an amendment to the Korea Development Bank (KDB) Act on 2025-08-27 (428th session, 3rd plenary sitting, 164-1 with 164 votes in favour of 165 cast), raising KDB's statutory capital ceiling from KRW 30 trillion to KRW 45 trillion and creating a new "Advanced Strategic Industry Fund" inside KDB. The fund is capitalised at KRW 50 trillion or more over five years via low-rate government-guaranteed bonds and is earmarked for the ten officially designated advanced strategic industries (AI, semiconductors, bio/vaccines, defense, robotics, hydrogen, secondary batteries, displays, future mobility) via cheap loans and equity investment. KDB intends to use the fund as seed capital for a wider "National Growth Fund" that blends in private and pension capital to reach KRW 100 trillion+ in total strategic-industry financing over five years.

The Hainan Provincial People's Government General Office issued "Several Policy Measures of Hainan Province for Further Supporting High-Quality Development of the Biopharmaceutical Industry" (Qiong Fu Ban [2025] No. 38) on 2025-08-14, effective 2025-09-13 for a three-year term. The package disburses provincial subsidies across the full biopharma value chain — R&D-stage grants, national centralized-procurement awards, international-certification bonuses, platform-investment reimbursement, and traditional-Chinese-medicine insurance-listing awards — leveraging Hainan Free Trade Port status to build a regional biomedical industry cluster.

On 13 August 2025 President Trump signed an Executive Order ("Ensuring American Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Resilience by Filling the Strategic Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients Reserve", Federal Register Doc. 2025-15823, published 19 August 2025) directing the HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) to refill and operationalise the Strategic Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients Reserve (SAPIR). Within 30 days, ASPR must compile an initial list of 26 essential drugs, account for available funding, and acquire and maintain a six-month supply of the corresponding APIs. Within 90 days, ASPR must deliver an expanded list of up to 86 essential medicines and medical countermeasures plus a plan to source those APIs from domestic manufacturers, and within 120 days (subject to appropriations) ready the existing SAPIR repository and submit a proposal and cost estimate for opening a second repository. The order prioritises domestically manufactured APIs in federal procurement and reserve build-out and directs interagency coordination across HHS/ASPR, FDA, DoD (Industrial Base Fund / Defense Production Act Title III), and the Department of Commerce.

The Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Armenia, chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan, approved the 2025-2030 Strategic Plan for Promoting Exports of the Republic of Armenia and its accompanying Action Plan on 31 July 2025. The Strategy targets a 1.7-fold increase in total Armenian exports to USD 16.9 billion by 2030 (USD 10.3 billion services + USD 6.6 billion goods), with an implementation envelope of approximately AMD 98 billion (~USD 250 million). It designates critical minerals (copper-molybdenum concentrates, gold, antimony, emerging rare-earth-element zones), IT and tech services, agri-processing, and green-transition equipment as priority export categories, and operationalises Armenia's ongoing reorientation of export geography away from Russia/EAEU toward EU, US, Gulf, and Asian markets.

On 11 June 2025, at the second Belt and Road Science and Technology Exchange Conference in Chengdu, Sichuan Province formally launched the "Sichuan Sci-Tech Achievement Transformation Investment Guidance Fund" (四川省成果转化投资引导基金) with a total scale of CNY 5 billion (~USD 700 million). The fund is capitalised 40% by the Sichuan Provincial Industrial Investment Guidance Fund, 40% by other in-province state funds, and 20% by capital raised from outside the province. It targets "invest early, invest small, invest in hard tech" bets across seven priority areas — tech/communications, new materials, advanced manufacturing, clean energy, medical and pharmaceutical, energy conservation/environmental protection, and specialised industries — aligned to Sichuan's "15+N" priority industrial-chain plan. Seven sub-funds (one seed-stage, three angel-stage, three venture-stage) totalling CNY 4.05 billion were already established at launch, and the fund's operator (Sichuan Industrial Revitalization Fund Investment Group) stated a 2025 investment target of over CNY 500 million, with CNY 150 million already committed across 4 AI and energy-equipment projects and a further CNY 390 million quasi-approved across 10 projects.

On 2025-06-02 Mexico published a presidential decree ("DECRETO por el que se fomenta la inversión en territorio nacional, para fortalecer el desarrollo de la industria farmacéutica y la producción de insumos para la salud; así como el desarrollo de investigación científica nacional") in the Diario Oficial de la Federación, effective 2025-06-03. Starting with fiscal-year 2026 consolidated federal purchases of medicines, health inputs and medical devices (for 2027 delivery), the Secretaría de Salud will apply a points-and-percentage evaluation scheme that favors bidders holding productive investment or infrastructure (plants, laboratories, warehouses) in Mexico, or that conduct scientific research domestically. A tri-ministry Promotion Committee (Health, Economy, and the Anticorruption/Public Function ministry) will vet investment commitments, and the decree directs the Secretaría de Salud to issue implementing guidelines within 90 calendar days of publication.

President Trump signed Executive Order 14273, "Delivering Most- Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing to American Patients", on 12 May 2025. The EO directs HHS, USTR, and Commerce to pursue mechanisms (negotiation targets, importation pathways, and trade-policy levers) to bring the prices Americans pay for innovative prescription drugs into alignment with the *lowest* prices paid by other comparably-developed nations — the "most-favored-nation" (MFN) benchmark. Unlike the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act drug-price-negotiation provisions (which apply to a handful of Medicare Part D drugs), the EO applies pressure across the broader pharmaceutical pricing surface. As of April 2026, 17 major pharmaceutical manufacturers (incl. Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AbbVie, Merck, AstraZeneca, Regeneron) have signed bilateral agreements bringing US drug prices toward the international- benchmark level for selected medications.

On 7 May 2025 the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture People's Government (Hunan Province) approved the establishment of a CNY 1 billion ($~140 million) Xiangxi Industrial Development Guidance Fund, publicised the following day on the Hunan provincial government portal. The fund runs a "1+X+N" mother-fund structure — 30% of its scale for direct investment, 70% seeded into sub-funds with social capital — and is earmarked for 11 priority industry chains, including manganese-zinc and aluminium-based composite materials and vanadium-lithium battery new-energy and electronics, alongside ecological-culture tourism, liquor/tobacco, traditional Chinese medicine/biopharma, and specialty agriculture. It is managed by the prefecture finance bureau and capitalised by consolidating existing industrial-subsidy funds, rolling investment returns, and new budget allocations.

On 11 March 2025 the European Commission published its proposal for a Critical Medicines Act (CMA), pillar of the broader EU pharmaceutical-resilience agenda alongside the EU Critical Raw Materials Act (filed: 2024-05-23-eu-crma-entry-into-force) and the IRA-style industrial-policy stack. The proposal targets supply security of an EU "Union List" of critical medicines (antibiotics, anti-thrombotics, oncology, cardiovascular, insulin, painkillers) by introducing four mechanisms: (1) Strategic Project status with expedited funding access for critical-medicine manufacturing or active-substance production; (2) public-procurement preferences favouring resilient supply chains and — in defined cases — EU-based production; (3) collaborative cross-Member-State procurement to address fragmented small markets; (4) state-aid framework guidance + international-partnership diversification to reduce single-country (often China-routed) API dependency.

On 1 February 2025, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the National Manufacturing Mission (NMM) in the Union Budget 2025-26 as a horizontal umbrella framework extending the 2014 "Make in India" architecture across small, medium and large industries. The mission rests on five focal areas: (i) ease and cost of doing business; (ii) a future-ready workforce for in-demand jobs; (iii) a vibrant and dynamic MSME sector; (iv) availability of technology; and (v) quality manufacturing. It will deliver policy support, execution roadmaps, and a governance/monitoring framework binding central ministries with states. NMM specifically commits to building a clean-tech manufacturing ecosystem with explicit coverage of solar PV cells, EV batteries, motors and controllers, electrolysers, wind turbines, very-high-voltage transmission equipment, and grid-scale batteries — i.e., the full hardware stack for India's Panchamrit (500 GW non-fossil by 2030), FAME-III EV ramp, and National Green Hydrogen Mission. NMM is the first horizontal Indian manufacturing-mission instrument in the IPTM register; existing IND entries are sector-specific PLIs (electronics, batteries, steel, semiconductors) and the National Critical Mineral Mission. Operational rollout flows through subsequent Cabinet-level scheme approvals (e.g. Biopharma SHAKTI ₹10,000 cr, Chemical Parks ₹600 cr in BE 2026-27); the mission itself does not carry a single headline outlay because it is the framework rather than an instrument.

On 9 January 2025, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs HE Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani unveiled the Qatar National Manufacturing Strategy 2024–2030 alongside the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MoCI) sectoral strategy at the Qatar National Convention Centre. The manufacturing strategy targets raising sectoral value-add to QAR 70.5bn (~USD 19.4bn), lifting non-hydrocarbon industrial exports above QAR 49bn (~USD 13.5bn), attracting annual industrial investment of QAR 2.75bn (~USD 755m), and placing Qatar among the world's top 40 economies in the UNIDO Competitiveness Industrial Performance index by 2030. It is built on four transformative pillars: shift to smart and green manufacturing, R&D-led productivity uplift, alignment of education and training with industrial demand, and expansion of Qatari workforce participation (Qatarisation), delivered through 15 strategic initiatives and 60 projects.