Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks told investors on Thursday that the company’s tens of billions of dollars of investment to meet the increasing demand for its wildly popular diabetes and obesity drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, is paying off.
“Since 2020, our commitments to build, expand, and acquire manufacturing facilities now total more than $23 billion,” Ricks told investors during a Thursday earnings call. “The incretin market continues to grow rapidly, and Mounjaro and Zepbound are both gaining share of market.”
Lilly “continues to invest heavily in increasing manufacturing capacity and estimates producing at least 1.6 times the amount of salable incretin doses in the first half of 2025, compared to the first half of 2024,” according to the company’s fourth-quarter 2024 financial results announced on Thursday.
During Thursday’s earnings call, TD Cowen analyst Steve Scala asked Ricks if Lilly’s “manufacturing build-out may simply be too aggressive?” Ricks replied that he has “zero doubt” that Lilly still has “more building to do and that the capacity we put in the ground so far is not sufficient to meet global demand.”
Both Lilly and rival Novo Nordisk have invested billions of dollars to ramp up their respective manufacturing capabilities to try and keep up with the unprecedented demand for their GLP-1 medications.
In December 2024, Lilly unveiled a $3 billion expansion of its recently acquired manufacturing facility in Kenosha County, Wisconsin — the single largest U.S. manufacturing investment outside the company’s home state of Indiana. The company is looking to extend its global parenteral (injectable) product manufacturing network to help meet the growing demand for Mounjaro and Zepbound.
Novo Nordisk will spend approximately $9 billion in 2025 to “create additional capacity across the supply chain,” according to its 2024 annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. That amount is an increase from the nearly $6.3 billion the Danish drugmaker spent last year to bolster its manufacturing capabilities and similar projects.
“Our expanding global production network is operating around the clock to ensure a stable and consistent supply of Wegovy,” according to the company’s annual report, which acknowledged that “production capacity has been stretched.”
Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide — marketed as Ozempic for type 2 diabetes and as Wegovy for obesity — remains in shortage, according to the FDA database.
In December 2024, the FDA issued a new decision reconfirming that Lilly’s tirzepatide injection shortage is resolved. In October, the agency announced that it was rethinking the shortage status of Lilly’s tirzepatide — the active ingredient in Mounjaro for type 2 diabetes and Zepbound for obesity — which the regulator removed from its shortage list earlier in the month, after a lawsuit was filed by the Outsourcing Facilities Association.
However, in the end, the FDA stood by its initial decision on tirzepatide.