By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
Let’s get to a stock moving at the market open this morning. Eli Lilly here, taking a look at shares down over seven and a half percent after the company cut its profit outlook despite topping first quarter estimates as demand for the company’s weight loss drugs surged. Yahoo Finance senior health reporter Anjali Khemlani is here now with a closer look at the results. Anjali, what do we know?
00:26 Anjali Khemlani
Yeah, so what’s pressuring the stock actually isn’t that profit cut. We do know that it came from a slightly higher tax rate for the year that the company announced. They did reaffirm their guidance. I want to point that out. Take a look at the numbers really quickly on your screen, beating those estimates handily. And then let’s go into the topic of the day, which is their GLP-1 drugs. When you think about Lily, of course, we can’t miss that. And those also came in ahead of estimates, moderately so. And that’s a little bit where the pressure is coming from, even though Zepbound, that’s the weight loss drug, has taken the lead over competitor Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy. We have seen some concerning news this morning. That is possibly the reason for pressuring the stock, and that is a deal between Novo Nordisk and CVS. Those two companies came up with a deal that puts Novo Nordisk Wegovy on CVS’s formulary as a preferred weight loss drug and excluding Zepbound. And that comes just as Zepbound took the lead in terms of weekly prescriptions in the recent past. I had a chance to speak to Eli Lilly’s CEO, David Ricks, and he told me that on the news of this deal, you know, the company isn’t really looking at it. He said it feels a little bit like last decade. These lockup deals, we’re not interested in exclusive deals. And that’s in part because he signaled to me that the company isn’t thinking just about these two drugs anymore. They’re already moving on to the new generation of the drugs, as well as that pill form. Lily now in the lead for getting first to market after Pfizer dropped out of the race earlier this month. So that’s where his focus is. Meanwhile, I also had a chance to talk about the tariffs and how the company’s thinking about that. Both CFO and CEO told me that they’re already planning for potential that’s already built into the guidance. And specifically, if the goal, quote, is to repatriate the supply chain, I would say probably the threat of tariffs has already done that. Declare victory and move on would be my advice is what Ricks said. Uh, talking about how, you know, the companies, we’ve seen a large number of companies announce major moves and major manufacturing commitments to the tune of billions of dollars. Eli Lilly itself announcing $27 billion in additional to take the total number to about $50 billion since 2020. So that’s a lot of where the move is coming from, and yet still, despite all these positives, you look on your screen, you can see Lilly sinking right now. We’ll have to see if Ricks can talk to investors later today and really get a move on that stock.
04:38 Speaker A
Anjali, thanks so much. Breaking these down, some big deals this week that have come forward, especially considering Wegovy just had another one with Hims and Hers earlier this week.
04:50 Anjali Khemlani
That’s right. They’re ramping up their telehealth, yeah.
04:55 Speaker A
Appreciate it.