(Reuters) -Eli Lilly on Thursday raised its annual profit forecast and boosted its revenue expectations by $3 billion, as it benefited from ramped up manufacturing capacity for its highly popular weight-loss and diabetes drugs.
Shares of the drugmaker rose more than 9% in premarket trading, with sales of its weight-loss drug, Zepbound, crossing $1 billion for the first time in a quarter.
The strong sales number for Zepbound comes a day after Danish rival Novo Nordisk reported a rare miss on quarterly sales of its weight-loss drug Wegovy and trimmed its full-year profit forecast.
Lilly and Novo are racing to increase manufacturing capacity to meet unprecedented demand for their popular weight-loss drugs that have been shown to help patients lose as much as 20% of their weight on average.
Analysts have said the companies will likely split the U.S. market roughly 50-50 by the end of 2024, as Lilly increases its manufacturing capacity and closes the gap with Novo.
Lilly has said it expected manufacturing in its new production lines to start over 2024 and for a new plant in Concord, North Carolina, to begin operations towards the end of the year.
Investor interest in these therapies has propelled Lilly’s market value to more than $700 billion. The stock has risen about 32% so far this year. Some analysts expect the market for weight-loss treatments to hit $150 billion by the early 2030s.
Quarterly sales of Mounjaro came in at $3.09 billion, while Zepbound sales were $1.24 billion.
Analysts had on average predicted sales of $2.49 billion for Mounjaro and $930.8 million for Zepbound. They expect the drugs to make a combined $15 billion this year.
The drugmaker now expects adjusted profit of $16.10 to $16.60 per share for 2024, compared with its prior forecast of $13.50 to $14.
Lilly projected overall revenues to be $45.4 billion to $46.6 billion, compared with its earlier expectations of $42.4 billion to $43.6 billion.
Both Novo’s Wegovy and Lilly’s Zepbound have been in shortage this year, according to the U.S. FDA’s website. The agency recently said all doses of Zepbound were now available, but did not remove the treatment from the shortage list.
(Reporting by Bhanvi Satija and Sriparna Roy in Bengaluru and Patrick Wingrove in New York; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)
