Eli Lilly (LLY) reported first quarter earnings on Thursday, beating Wall Street’s expectations on the top and bottom lines, but GLP-1 sales weren’t as strong as expected.
The company reported adjusted earnings per share of $3.34 compared to the consensus of $3.10. Revenue came in at $12.73 billion, compared to estimates of $12.67 billion.
Eli Lilly stock was trading down nearly 5% in premarket Thursday. Investors saw sales of blockbuster GLP-1s — Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for weight loss — come in “modestly” ahead of consensus. The two drugs alone brought in a combined $6.1 billion, or nearly half of the revenue in the quarter. Zepbound was ahead by $32 million while Mounjaro came in ahead by $70 million.
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Still, Eli Lilly holds the lead in the current race between first-to-market Novo Nordisk (NVO) for weight loss as Zepbound overtook Wegovy in recent months. But that could be threatened by an announcement Thursday that one of the country’s largest pharmacy benefit managers, CVS (CVS), is excluding Zepbound in favor of Wegovy on its formulary.
Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks told Yahoo Finance he is not worried about the PBM move and is instead focusing on the next generation of drugs.
“We’re well into the product replacement cycle, and there’s more to come. We’re not interested in exclusive deals,” Ricks said.
“It feels a little bit like last decade, these sort of lock-up deals,” he added.
Eli Lilly’s weekly prescription data for Zepbound is up 354% year over year while Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy is up just 61%. That’s based on the latest prescription tracking data by analytics firm IQVIA, which shows total prescriptions for Wegovy at 211,103 in the week of April 18 and Zepbound totaling 338,899 prescriptions in the same week.
Eli Lilly still lags behind Novo Nordisk in the diabetes space, with Ozempic accounting for 43% of the market share while Mounjaro takes 39%, based on IQVIA data.
The company has been ramping up production of the injectable GLP-1s to meet ongoing demand. Both Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly executives have said in the past that demand will outstrip supply for some time. And both companies have seen the FDA take their drugs off its shortage list, meaning competition from compounding pharmacies, which were allowed to make copycats of the patented products, will reduce.
Still, Eli Lilly is now the lead contender for first-to-market in pill form after Pfizer (PFE) halted its clinical trial this month.
