Eli Lilly surpassed analysts’ expectations for 2025 and fourth quarter revenues on Wednesday morning and anticipates a large increase in revenue this year, marking a sharp juxtaposition to its main rival, Novo Nordisk, which expects to shrink in 2026.
Lilly
said
it pulled in $19.29 billion in the last quarter of 2025, thanks to $11.66 billion from its tirzepatide franchise. Analysts had expected $17.8 billion for the quarter. Full-year 2025 revenues came in at $65.17 billion, well above the $63.9 billion that analysts projected and $63.5 billion that Lilly
predicted in October
.
Lilly expects major sales growth this year, as well. The company predicts $80 billion to $83 billion in revenue this year. That would be less than the 45% revenue growth it charted from 2024 to 2025, but still a meaningful bump up, and would make it one of the largest drugmakers by revenue.
The large drugmaker’s main competitor, Novo Nordisk, disappointed the market a day earlier with the news that it expects
sales to shrink
by 5% to 13% at constant exchange rates in 2026. Novo’s crushing guidance led to a 14% dip in its share price and affected other weight-loss drug developers. Lilly’s stock closed down 3.9% on Tuesday, as well.
The Indianapolis pharma giant’s Wednesday full-year 2025 report marks the first earnings clip since being crowned the first trillion-dollar healthcare company in November, entering rarefied territory amongst the ranks of mostly tech behemoths. Lilly’s stature has drastically risen in recent years as the drugmaker surpassed its Danish rival in the obesity market.
Lilly is hot on the heels of Novo on the oral GLP-1 front. Novo was once again first to market with an oral GLP-1 for obesity — with more than
170,000 Wegovy pill prescriptions
in January. Lilly CEO David Ricks
told
CNBC
last week that he expects “immediate” Medicare coverage following the potential launch of its pill, called orforglipron, next quarter.
A suite of next-generation anti-obesity medicines is in the works in Lilly’s labs to fend off the dozens of companies attempting to enter the field. One of those potential future competitors, Pfizer,
delivered data
on the long-acting GLP-1 it got in the up to $10 billion Metsera deal. Investors and analysts were a little underwhelmed by the Tuesday data drop.
Lilly has also been slinging deals to pad out its pipeline beyond obesity. It made
39 transactions
in 2025, including cancer biotech Scorpion, pain drug developer SiteOne and genetic medicines companies Verve and Adverum.
While it’s brought in multiple external assets, it has also recently dropped some programs. In the last quarter, it culled an actinium-based radiopharmaceutical for prostate cancer, a CD19 antibody for multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis and a gene therapy for frontotemporal dementia, according to its earnings
presentation
.