STAT+: Why Eli Lilly’s earnings didn’t quite live up to the hype
At first, Eli Lilly's earnings report suggested the company had blasted through expectations again. But its wins, it turned out, came with asterisks.
Eventually, the luckiest companies get to deal with a very particular problem: what to do when their stock could be getting ahead of itself.
It’s a problem Eli Lilly got a little taste of Tuesday when it announced its full-year earnings. The drugmaker’s stock has more than doubled over the past 12 months due to the ever-increasing hopes for its GLP-1-based diabetes and weight loss drug, sold under the brand names Mounjaro and Zepbound. It was a big deal when Lilly became the first drug company ever to have a market value of $500 billion; it’s now sitting at a stunning $670 billion.
At first, the earnings report suggested the company had blasted through expectations again, announcing fourth-quarter 2023 sales of $9.35 billion, almost half a billion dollars above analysts’ expectations, and also announcing new data for Mounjaro in treating metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), a form of liver disease previously called NASH. Initially, shares traded up 5%.
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