Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks on $1T market value, obesity pill launch and drug pipeline outlook

Well, it's really been a story of innovation. I think we're the only trillion dollar company east of the Mississippi, the rest are tech companies. What did we do at Lilly? We sped up the R&D cycle and really bet on ideas that could scale and reach a lot of people. For a long time, the industry focused on specialty medicine, small markets, orphan diseases. We've done a bit of that in cancer, but mostly we focused on common diseases, and of course the most common disease is obesity. That's driven us to where we are now. We're focused on building out that market, adding even more innovation this year with the potential launch of our oral later this year, as well as reading out the data set for the triple-acting triple G retatrutide. All that data will come in by mid year, and at the same time expanding our manufacturing footprint and investing in new innovation outside of obesity for the long term. It's a really exciting time at Lilly, and the goal is not necessarily to just drive the market cap up, but to make great medicines that help millions and millions of people.

Well, I think Novo had a first mover advantage in injectables as well. I think that's missing the point. The thing that's very attractive about the orals is that these aren't necessarily more effective medications. They're more accessible medications. Having choice will be great. Let's remember today in the US, there are maybe 100 to 120 million people who could benefit from these medications, and we're treating about 10 or 12. So we're about 10% into the market. The real thing that orals will do, Novo's perhaps, but we think ours as well, is expand the reach of this class so more people can have access with their insurance, with self-pay options, or however they'd like to get it. That's going to be market expansive, I think, over the next three to four years in a very significant way.

Well, margins are good, and the cost is in R&D. What we had to do, which is different from what Novo did, which repurposed its protein into an oral, we created a whole new molecule using chemistry. That's a difficult scientific feat, one I think no one else has done yet. Last year was important for the company to discharge the risk that can come with that, which is off-target safety events. The oral program looks very clean. It's under review at the FDA and we can scale it. This points out another thing: not only can it be a more convenient option in Europe and the US where we already have injectables, but we can really reach the globe, low and middle income countries where maybe the first thing we don't think about is obesity, but it's a growing cause of diabetes and chronic disease in places like India, China, Brazil. There was no way we can meet all that demand with injectable systems. The oral can reach these markets and really scale. In fact, we've already submitted in dozens of countries around the world within weeks of our final data set reading out. So we're excited that this will be a year to introduce our oral around the world and really scale that business, reach more patients.

Absolutely. We're very confident in supply. You may remember last year at this conference, there were like three big questions. Will the oral pill work? We just talked about that. The second one was whether there was enough supply to grow the business. That was the gating factor on our growth in 2024. In 2025 we solved that. The team executed incredibly. We have some of our new plants up and running, but actually the majority of that investment, $50 billion we've put in the ground, is not online yet. So we have a lot more growth in supply ahead of us. I don't foresee any problems in the coming years with supply, and we have a pretty big lead over everyone else in terms of that capital base.