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With stock skyrocketing, Lilly invests in Indiana
Eli Lilly and Co. CEO David Ricks—IBJ’s newsmaker of the year in 2023—returns to the newsmaker list in 2024 after a year that included a stock price that skyrocketed to an all-time high of $972 and announcements about big new investments in Lebanon and Ireland.
Lilly’s stock price has retreated since that high mark, but Lilly remains the most valuable publicly traded pharmaceutical company in the world, with a market value of nearly $700 billion, making it the world’s 12th-most valuable company, according to financial website The Motley Fool. That’s one spot above Walmart.
The investor confidence in the company is driven in large part by Lilly’s existing stable of drugs—including weight-loss blockbuster Zepbound—and those in the pipeline.
That’s also what led Lilly in October to announce that it would invest an additional $4.5 billion at the manufacturing site it has under construction at the LEAP Research and Innovation District in Lebanon and hire 400 more full-time employees there. The new funding will bring the Indianapolis-based drugmaker’s total investment in the Boone County site to more than $13 billion, making the development one of the largest capital projects in Indiana history.
The announcement came just weeks after Lilly said it planned to spend $1.8 billion on two of its manufacturing sites in Ireland to boost production of medicines for Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes
and obesity.•
Check out more 2024 Newsmakers.
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