Big Pharma Earnings Watch: Eli Lilly

Pharmaceutical Giant Beats Q3 Profit Forecasts After Hiking Prices on Drugs Used to Treat Diabetes and Cancer

Yesterday, Eli Lilly joined fellow Big Pharma giants Johnson & Johnson, Roche and Novartis in surpassing earnings expectations for the third quarter of 2019 — after continuing to hike prices on its medications despite the rising crisis of affordability.

The brand name drug maker boasted revenues of $5.48 billion and beat Wall Street expectations with an earnings surprise of 3.5 percent. In fact, over the past year, the brand name drug maker has surpassed estimates three times while repeatedly increasing prices on its top-selling drugs:

• Sales of Trulicity, a drug used to treat diabetes, rose 24 percent this quarter, accounting for a whopping $1.08 billion in revenue for the company.
• So far this year, Eli Lilly has raised the price of Trulicity four percent.
• This summer, Eli Lilly also jacked up the price of three of its cancer drugs – Cyramza, Alimta and Erbitux.

• Eli Lilly came under fire earlier this year when it was revealed that the average list price of the drug “rose 52%, or more than $200, from 2014 to mid-2017.”
• Eli Lilly is one of three companies that control 99 percent of the insulin market. In 1996, a 10-milliliter vial of Humalog cost $21, but today, the same vial costs patients $275.