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%.