Times are good at Eli Lilly. Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for weight-loss drug stocks looks set to turn the company into the world’s first $1tn drugmaker by market value.
But war stories about gloomier times are never far away when you run a pharmaceutical company. In the late 2000s, Eli Lilly’s share price neared all-time lows as patents of its blockbuster psychiatric drugs — chief among them Prozac, Zyprexa and Cymbalta — expired.
Consolidation was then sweeping the industry, recalls chief executive Dave Ricks, a 25-year veteran, and Eli Lilly was at risk of becoming “the back end of a hyphen to someone else”. The wheel of fortune has since turned. The company’s main problem is building production lines fast enough to meet demand for its blockbuster diabetes and weight-loss drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound, part of a new class of drugs known as GLP-1s.