Eli Lilly & Co. raised its full-year sales forecast as demand for its blockbuster obesity and diabetes drugs continues to surge. Speaking on "Bloomberg Open Interest," Bloomberg's Madison Muller also discusses the implications for Novo Nordisk.
Madison, talk to us about Eli Lilly because, to Danny's point, they're one of the few bright spots at least this morning. I mean, talk to us about how much their expansion into pills and other powerful weight loss drugs will drive their future growth.
Yeah, exactly. Thank you guys so much for having me. I mean, it's another amazing quarter for Lily. I feel like it they continue to surprise the street just with how much they're able to continue raising their sales guidance. This is the third time this year. Really showing that the GLP-1 market and the demand for weight loss drugs is not going anywhere and not slowing down anytime soon and Lily still sees a lot more room to grow. One of the things that they're pointing out this quarter is that if you guys recall earlier this year, um Medicare, which is the government health insurance program for elderly people, actually expanded access to obesity medicines. And so that's been one of the things that's helping to drive growth even further, expanding to more patients and really continuing to propel this market forward.
Novo is also up 2% this morning, Madison. Is good news for Eli Lily good news for Novo Nordisk or bad news for them?
It's a good question. Um, honestly, no. I mean, usually we're seeing, we've seen quite a divergence between these two companies in past quarters and Novo has yet to report yet, but I think people are seeing the momentum at least in the Medicare space as a positive thing for both Lily and Novo, um because it's clear that patients are taking advantage of that option and that's probably expanding this market. But it's been interesting. I mean, the two companies, even though Novo was first to this weight loss market, has really fallen behind Lily. Lily has a more powerful drug called Zepbound, um, which has been able to overtake Novo's Wegovy, which was again, the first drug to this obesity market. Uh, but when it comes to the newer mechanisms like pills, interestingly, Novo's pill, which is a pill version of Wegovy, has been more successful and that's one of the areas that we've seen some weakness for Lily this quarter. Their newer weight loss pill Foundeo is not growing as much as analysts had expected, and so sales missed estimates this quarter. Uh, but they've recently started ramping up their direct to consumer advertising campaigns. I don't know if you guys have been seeing their Martha Stewart ads, which I see all the time uh when they're playing dancing with the stars. So, we'll see what happens with that and see if if that uh helps at all with demand.
