Like Johnson & Johnson did during its earnings call the day before, Abbott estimated that global tariffs would end up costing “a few hundred million dollars” in the latter half of this year, according to CEO Robert Ford—though he said he was confident the company could partially weather the storm by investing in its distributed production network.

“While tariffs will have a financial impact, with 90 manufacturing sites around the world—and decades of experience executing our global network strategy—we’re well positioned to implement mitigation to help manage the impact of the tariffs,” Ford said, while announcing the company’s first-quarter results.

Abbott posted 8.3% growth in revenue year-over-year, when accounting for foreign currency fluctuations and excluding the ongoing decline in its COVID-19 testing business, for $10.36 billion in total worldwide sales. The company also held steady with its financial forecasts for 2025, with projections of between 7.5% and 8.5% growth and $5.05 to $5.25 adjusted earnings-per-share.

“Prior to the tariffs… and given the momentum that we were seeing in the base business, we were even considering raising our EPS guidance,” Ford said. “But tariffs are here, so we felt that reaffirming our guidance was already a pretty strong statement.”

Ford said that the heaviest impacts would fall between the U.S. and China, starting mainly in the third quarter. However, the company’s manufacturing base has been, for years, built on locating production as close as possible to the customer, and then adding redundancy to protect against supply chain risks, he added. 

“Tariffs weren’t on our list of risks, but it provides a lot of maneuverability,” Ford said. 

As an example, he pointed to Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre continuous glucose monitors, where two U.S. production sites are focused on meeting domestic demand, while four additional international locations serve the rest of the world.

“We did that with COVID tests too, where Binax was made in the U.S. for the U.S., and Panbio was made outside the U.S. for international markets,” he said. “If we had put all of our manufacturing in Southeast Asia, or put all of our manufacturing in Europe, then that might be a little bit more complicated, but we’ve always had a view of spreading it out.”

Additional offsets could include the weakening value of the U.S. dollar, Ford said, as well as potential changes in interest rates and tax policy. “I can tell you that there’s not a lot of R&D slowing down, or SG&A slowing down, in our mitigation plans—but there are variables to consider,” he said. 

In its release, the company also highlighted two manufacturing and R&D investments at new locations in Illinois and Texas, totaling $500 million, which are slated to go live by the end of this year.

“We need to think about mitigating this in a long-term, sustainable way. You can use a balance sheet, and you can build some inventory, and we’ll probably do some of that—but if your entire strategy is building inventory, guess what’s going to happen in 2026? Or whenever that inventory runs out? So we’re really looking at our manufacturing network and optimizing it.”

For the first quarter, the $4.90 billion in revenue from the company’s medical device divisions grew 12.6% on an organic basis, compared to the same period last year. That included a 27.1% increase in Abbott’s U.S. diabetes care business, as well as a 20.9% gain in U.S. structural heart sales.

Diagnostics’ $2.05 billion, meanwhile, represented a drop of 4.9% on the whole, or a swing to a 0.5% gain when excluding COVID test sales—which collected $84 million versus 2024’s $204 million. The company said it also lost ground in the sector due to volume-based procurement programs in China.

Going forward, Abbott pointed to March’s European approval of its Volt pulsed field ablation platform—one of the latest green lights in a growing field of atrial fibrillation systems that has seen entrants from Boston Scientific, Medtronic and J&J. The company also recently launched a U.S. pivotal clinical trial of an intravascular lithotripsy system designed to clear paths through blockages in the heart’s coronary arteries.