Eli Lilly (LLY) — Dominant Growth Engine in Weight Management Heading Into 2026
Eli Lilly continues to look like one of the strongest healthcare franchises to own as we move into 2026, driven by a combination of exceptional execution, category leadership, and a deep pipeline that keeps extending its growth runway.
The company’s biggest driver remains tirzepatide, marketed as Mounjaro for Type 2 diabetes and Zepbound for obesity. Through the first nine months of 2025 alone, tirzepatide generated $24.8 billion in revenue, surpassing Keytruda to become the world’s best-selling drug. That kind of performance is hard to overstate, and it doesn’t appear to be peaking anytime soon. Some projections call for tirzepatide sales approaching $62 billion by 2030, which helps explain why Lilly’s financial momentum has been so durable.
What stands out to us is how well Lilly is defending its lead even as competition intensifies. Rivals like Novo Nordisk, Amgen, and Pfizer are pushing aggressively into weight management, yet Lilly keeps raising the bar clinically. Orforglipron, its oral weight-loss and diabetes candidate, successfully completed Phase 3 studies in 2025 and is already under regulatory review. Thanks to a voucher that shortens the approval timeline to roughly one to two months, Lilly could receive a decision by the end of February, a near-term catalyst that keeps the story moving.
Beyond that, retatrutide adds another layer of upside. In a Phase 3 study, the drug delivered a mean weight loss of 28.7% at the highest dose, a level of efficacy that hasn’t been seen before in this category. With multiple best-in-class assets advancing at once, Lilly’s leadership in obesity and metabolic disease looks increasingly difficult to dislodge.
From a valuation perspective, the stock trades around $1,064, or roughly 33 times forward earnings, well above the healthcare sector average of about 18. That premium is meaningful, but it’s supported by growth that most large-cap healthcare companies simply can’t match. Lilly’s price-to-earnings-to-growth ratio sits at 0.98, which suggests the valuation is reasonable given how fast revenue and earnings are expanding.
Taken together, Eli Lilly combines blockbuster execution today with a pipeline that keeps pushing growth further out. That mix of scale, innovation, and visibility is why we see LLY as a high-quality stock to own in 2026 and beyond, even after an exceptional run.
