Eli Lilly's $3.8 Billion Vaccine Bets: Here's the Big Story Many Investors Are Missing
2026-06-06 15:35:00 ET
Two drugs make up nearly two-thirds of Eli Lilly 's (NYSE: LLY) top line, generating around $12.8 billion in revenues in the first quarter of 2026. The two drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, are growing strongly as well, with sales up 125% and 80% year over year, respectively, in the first quarter. So why should investors care that Eli Lilly just spent $3.8 billion to buy three vaccine-focused companies?
To make the Mounjaro and Zepbound story even more interesting, those two medications are both GLP-1 weight-loss drugs . This is a hot new category in the pharmaceutical sector where Eli Lilly is currently the category leader. Essentially, the stock increasingly looks like a one-tick pony, and investors are happy about it, noting that the price-to-earnings ratio is a lofty 39x. The average pharmaceutical stock has a P/E of around 24x.
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