Drug sales, driven by blockbuster weight-loss and diabetes drugs, continued to impress Wall Street this earnings season as the pharmaceutical industry’s tariff fears start to fade.
Most major drugmakers reported earnings that beat the Street’s estimates, while tariffs seemed to be an afterthought. All the while, a bitter bid-off between two major players escalated as the reports rolled in. |
- This quarter solidified Eli Lilly’s dominance in the GLP-1 market. The company’s blockbuster diabetes and weight-loss medication, tirzepatide, which is sold under the brand names Mounjaro and Zepbound, was the most sold drug in the world this quarter — by a lot.
- Novo Nordisk, which was first to the GLP-1 game, appears to have lost its thunder. Sales of the company’s diabetes and weight-loss shot — semaglutide, which is sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy — were flat quarter over quarter and about $2 billion less than Lilly’s competing shot.
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Pfizer launched a legal battle this week against Novo for seeking to intercept its acquisition bid for Metsera, an obesity biotech working on a next-generation GLP-1 drug.
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Metsera said on Monday that both Novo and Pfizer had sweetened their bids for the company, but Novo’s was still superior to Pfizer’s. Novo’s bid is worth up to $10 billion, while Pfizer’s is worth up to $8.1 billion. |
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Tariffs on pharmaceuticals, which have rattled drugmakers’ stocks this year, have now taken a back seat as the administration’s policy stance takes shape. In September, Pfizer secured a three-year grace period from tariffs by committing to investing in US manufacturing and agreeing to sell its drugs at a discount to the government and through direct-to-consumer channels. Considering most Big Pharma companies have announced US investments this year and offer a DTC option on some drugs, it gave a clear pathway for other drugmakers to strike similar deals.
The word “tariff” has gone largely unmentioned on drug companies’ earnings calls, especially compared to the last two quarters. |
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- The deal aims to help the iPhone maker improve its lagging AI efforts, powering a new Siri slated to come out this spring.
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Apple had previously been considering using OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, but decided in the end to go with Google as it works toward improving its own internal models.
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Google, which makes a much less widely sold phone, the Pixel, has succeeded in bringing consumer AI to smartphone users where Apple has failed.
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Google’s antitrust ruling in September helped safeguard the two companies’ partnerships — including the more than $20 billion Google pays Apple each year to be the default search engine on its devices — as long as they aren’t exclusive.
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Apple’s lackluster AI efforts have been a bit embarrassing for a company that is more accustomed to utterly dominating in customer-facing consumer products. Its internal teams have been reliably raided by rivals, and given it’s got a massive cash pile, many were wondering at what point the iPhone maker would throw in the towel on its internal attempts to kickstart an AI business and just do the more logical avenue: namely, buying or renting one. It seems like for the time being, it’s going with the latter option, at least until something better comes along.
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In recent years, 67-year-old chain Pizza Hut has fallen behind rival Domino’s in the ’za-making stakes. But now, it looks like the Hut might no longer even have a place in its parent company’s portfolio.
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