Recent data from the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina (EDPNC) shows that pharmaceuticals have become the state’s top global export. The industry, which produced 15% of North Carolina’s exports in 2019, accounted for more than one quarter of exports in 2024.
Of North Carolina’s three largest exports in 2024 — pharmaceutical products; industrial machinery, including computers; and electric machinery, including sound equipment, TV equipment, and parts — only pharmaceuticals experienced significant growth since 2019, both in total sales and as a proportion of the state’s total exports.
Between 2019 and 2024, pharmaceutical exports grew 134%, with North Carolina selling almost $12 billion in pharmaceuticals globally in 2024 alone. Industrial machinery, in comparison, grew only 10% during the same period and contracted as a share of state exports. Electric machinery, similarly, grew by just 5% and accounted for a smaller share of total exports than in 2019. Total exports of all other commodities experienced similarly modest growth — only about 6%.
The large majority of North Carolina’s pharmaceutical exports have come specifically from the biopharmaceutical sector. $8.72 billion of the roughly $12 billion in pharmaceuticals that the state exported last year, coming out to 73% of such exports, were immunological products — specifically vaccines, blood antisera, toxins, and cultures. That means North Carolina’s biopharmaceutical industry, which directly employs just 0.31% of the state’s approximately 11 million residents, produced 20% of its export value in 2024.
North Carolina’s trade with China has experienced the same trends apparent in the state’s global trade, albeit in a more pronounced fashion. In 2019, pharmaceuticals, industrial machinery, and electric machinery together accounted for just over half of exports to China. Of that number, pharmaceuticals were nearly 40% of exports. By 2024, pharmaceuticals alone accounted for 57% of all North Carolina exports to China.
Of the $2.67 billion increase in North Carolina’s exports to China between since 2019, $2.12 billion came from growth in pharmaceutical exports. Much of this growth can be attributed to a two-year period from 2020 to 2022, wherein pharmaceutical exports increased by a remarkable 471%. Even when pushing the starting year back to 2019 to account for 2020’s anomalously low export numbers, pharmaceuticals’ growth rate over the now three-year period remains high at 217%. As a result of this rapid growth, North Carolina’s exports to China have nearly doubled in just six years.
Pharmaceuticals’ levels of growth have not been matched by any other export category of significant volume. The total growth of all non-pharmaceutical exports to China was just 28% over six years, compared to pharmaceuticals’ 167% growth in the same time. Consequently, North Carolina’s overall trade deficit with China is $3.39 billion smaller today than it would be without pharmaceutical exports.
North Carolina’s pharmaceutical exports to China have not been matched in volume by Chinese pharmaceutical imports to the state. Imports of Chinese pharmaceuticals through 2024 were negligible — two orders of magnitude lower than exports to China. As a result, North Carolina has maintained a multi-billion-dollar trade surplus over China in the pharmaceutical sector since 2020.
Although the growth of pharmaceutical exports has so far appeared durable, with pharmaceuticals growing by nearly 9% year-to-date through July 2025 while all other exports shrank by more than 4%, the impact of a proposed 100% tariff on branded and patented pharmaceuticals remains to be seen. Additional market uncertainty or retaliation by tariff-impacted countries have the potential to disrupt the industry’s, to-date, rapid growth.
