Celltrion, the Korean drugmaker built on copycat biologics, is spending billions of dollars to refashion itself as something closer to a global pharmaceutical heavyweight, buying and expanding an Eli Lilly plant in New Jersey, pouring money into new factories at home and pushing an experimental oral obesity drug it says can outdo Wegovy (semaglutide).

In an online briefing on Wednesday, the company’s chairman, Seo Jung-jin, described a strategy that stretches from tariff politics in Washington to weight-loss clinics in Seoul. 

He said Celltrion had “completely eliminated” its U.S. tariff risk by moving production onto American soil and predicted that, from the fourth quarter, its operating margin could compete with that of Samsung Biologics before that company’s corporate split.

“The U.S. government’s policy is that anything you sell in America should be made in America,” Seo told reporters. “By acquiring a local plant, we have met that requirement and completely eliminated tariff risk.” He said Celltrion would hold a ceremony on Jan. 5 with U.S. officials to mark the transfer of operations at a biologics site in Branchburg, N.J., and “be formally recognized as a domestic manufacturer in the United States.”

Celltrion agreed in September to buy the Branchburg facility from ImClone Systems Holdings, a Lilly subsidiary, for $330 million, or about 460 billion won. Including initial operating capital, the up-front commitment comes to roughly 700 billion won, Seo said. 

The plant will not sit idle. Celltrion is taking over the active-ingredient contract manufacturing business Lilly has been running there, giving the Korean group an immediate revenue stream as it adds its own products.

Seo said the site’s hardware “is in no way inferior to Songdo,” the company’s main complex in Incheon, and its information-technology backbone is “even more advanced.” 

He said there were enough engineers on the ground that Celltrion would not need to build a separate research center in the United States. The company has already won approval from Ireland’s competition authority and from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, clearing the core antitrust hurdles for closing the deal by year-end.

The acquisition is being framed as an insurance policy as much as an expansion. After a recent summit between Washington and Seoul, the United States agreed to cap tariffs on Korean pharmaceuticals at 15 percent. Generic drugs will remain duty-free by category, but biosimilars were not explicitly addressed.

To lock in a favorable status, Celltrion plans to spend at least another 700 billion won expanding the Branchburg plant, installing three 11,000-liter bioreactors over three years and another three in a second phase, depending on demand. The addition of 66,000 liters of capacity will bring the site’s total to 132,000 liters and push the combined bill for acquisition and expansion to at least 1.4 trillion won.

“This is about going through the procedures needed for Celltrion to be officially recognized as a tariff-free company,” Seo said. With the planned expansion, he added, the company would have “the necessary and sufficient conditions” to remain untaxed even if the United States later imposes product-specific levies on medicines. “Celltrion has now completely freed itself from the U.S. government’s price-cut pressure and tariff demands,” he said.

The spending will not be confined to New Jersey. Seo said that at a recent follow-up meeting on U.S.–Korea tariff talks at the presidential office in Yongsan, he had pledged to invest 4 trillion won over the next three years in domestic manufacturing. The company is already adding a liquid drug-product plant next to its first factory in Songdo and plans a new drug-substance plant on the same campus, a finished-dose plant in Yesan in South Chungcheong Province and a prefilled syringe plant in Ochang in North Chungcheong Province.

By 2030, he said, Songdo’s existing capacity alone will not be enough to meet global demand outside the United States. Celltrion expects to need about 180,000 liters of additional capacity for export markets. Building a completely new plant would cost roughly 1.8 trillion won, he said, while using spare land in Songdo could cut that to about 1.6 trillion won. The pace and size of that spending, he added, would be adjusted depending on how U.S. policy and demand evolve.

Behind the concrete, the company is trying to make a more basic shift. Celltrion now has 11 biosimilars approved in major markets. Seo said it aims to have 18 by 2030 and 41 by 2038, meaning two to three new launches a year. The list includes planned copies of Merck’s Keytruda for melanoma, Novartis’s Cosentyx for psoriasis, Roche’s Ocrevus for multiple sclerosis and Johnson & Johnson’s Darzalex for multiple myeloma, all blockbusters with annual sales in the billions.

The sharpest bet is in obesity. Investors have asked why Celltrion stayed out of the first wave of GLP-1 injections from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. Seo’s answer is that the company intends to skip straight to what he calls “four-agonist” therapy, using a single oral drug to stimulate four metabolic and hormonal receptors at once instead of the single, dual or triple agonists now in late-stage development.

He argued that current GLP-1 drugs have “two big problems,” a large group of patients who do not respond and broad loss of muscle mass. Celltrion’s lead obesity program, CT-G32, is a four-agonist candidate being developed as a pill. The company says it expects the non-response rate to fall to under 5 percent and weight loss to reach about 25 percent of body weight, while lessening loss of lean mass and improving fat breakdown.

“The era of Wegovy will not last long,” Seo said, referring to Novo Nordisk’s best-selling injection. “Next-generation drugs have to reduce this side effect and be oral if they are going to survive in the market.” 

He said Celltrion had identified several four-agonist molecules it considers more potent than existing global products and planned to finish animal testing and secure patents on three of them by year-end, then move into preclinical work for approval as early as next year.

To finance the expansion into new modalities, Seo said Celltrion would spend more than 800 billion won on research and development next year and lift that to 1 trillion won annually by 2027. He said the group also plans to build a 1 trillion won fund to back startups and external partners, embedding collaboration into its pipeline rather than relying only on internal projects.