(Reuters) -Eli Lilly forecast annual profit largely above Wall Street estimates on Thursday, banking on the launch of its popular diabetes and weight-loss treatments in new markets.
On an adjusted basis, the U.S. drugmaker expects to earn between $22.50 and $24.00 per share in 2025. Analysts were expecting a profit of $22.86 per share, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Quarterly sales of diabetes drug Mounjaro came in at $3.53 billion, compared with analysts expectations of $4.27 billion.
Zepbound, its weight-loss treatment, reported revenue of $1.91 billion, below the $2.03 billion analysts were expecting.
Lilly last month said it expected fourth-quarter sales of Zepbound and Mounjaro to miss Wall Street estimates.
The company has blamed physical and financial constraints at wholesalers, but some investors have expressed concerns about cooling demand for GLP-1s, the class of treatments to which both Zepbound and rival Wegovy belong.
Lilly’s Zepbound and Danish rival Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy dominate a market for weight-loss treatments that analysts expect to be a $150 billion market by the early 2030s. Both the drugmakers have seen rapid growth in recent years, fueled by investor interest in their weight-loss and diabetes treatments.
Shares were up 2.2% in premarket trading.
(Reporting by Bhanvi Satija and Mariam Sunny in Bengaluru and Patrick Wingrove in New York; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)
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