Key Takeaways
- Citigroup reiterated its Buy rating on Eli Lilly with a Street-high $1,600 price target, and Berenberg upgraded the stock to Buy from Hold, raising its target to $1,400 from $1,220, both citing Foundayo’s oral obesity momentum.
- Foundayo’s U.S. prescriber base grew from 8,000 to 36,000 in about six weeks, and the pill has crossed 30% share of new oral GLP-1 starts, narrowing what was roughly a 90% Novo Wegovy lead just weeks earlier.
- Foundayo still generated only about $100 million of Lilly’s $22.97 billion in second-quarter 2026 revenue, under half a percent, while Zepbound and Mounjaro drove both the 47.6% revenue growth and an 85.78% gross margin high.
- The upside in this week’s targets depends on catalysts still ahead: an FDA type 2 diabetes decision Lilly expects “later this year” and an international rollout management says mostly lands in 2027.
Eli Lilly Stock: Two Upgrades, One Story on Foundayo’s Prescription Momentum
On September 15, Citigroup’s Geoff Meacham reiterated his Buy rating on Eli Lilly with a $1,600 price target, the highest on Wall Street and roughly 45% above where shares traded that morning. Berenberg went further in one respect, actually moving its rating, upgrading Lilly to Buy from Hold and raising its target to $1,400 from $1,220, about 25% above the stock’s prior close. Both firms pointed to the same underlying story: Foundayo, Lilly’s oral GLP-1 pill, is taking prescription share faster than expected, and Berenberg specifically flagged the pending U.S. type 2 diabetes approval as a near-term catalyst.
The prescription data backs up the enthusiasm. On the Q2 2026 earnings earnings call, Lilly said Foundayo had around 8,000 prescribers. By the company’s September 14 appearance at the Morgan Stanley healthcare conference, that figure had climbed to 36,000, and Ilya Yuffa, president of Lilly USA, said the pill now holds more than 30% share of new oral GLP-1 starts, a marked improvement from just two months earlier. That matters because Novo Nordisk’s oral Wegovy reportedly held close to 90% of that same market as recently as August. A flip that fast, in a category this large, is the kind of leading indicator analysts get paid to notice early.
It’s worth noting what’s driving the volume, though. Foundayo is priced at $25 a month with commercial coverage, $149 a month for self-pay patients, and $50 a month through the new Medicare GLP-1 Bridge program, all well below Zepbound’s direct-to-consumer tiers of $299 to $449. Script counts and revenue don’t move in lockstep when the newer product is both cheaper and disproportionately self-pay.
Eli Lilly’s Revenue And Margin Trend Still Belongs To The Injectables
Lilly’s total revenue has climbed every quarter for the past year, from $15.56 billion in the second quarter of 2025 to $22.97 billion in the second quarter of 2026, a 47.6% year-over-year increase.
Gross margin followed a similar arc: after drifting between 81.02% and 84.27% over the prior seven quarters, it jumped to an 85.78% high this quarter, its best reading in the two-year stretch shown in Eli Lilly’s financials.
None of that acceleration can be credited to Foundayo in any meaningful way. At roughly $100 million, the pill’s contribution to a $22.97 billion quarter is under half a percent, next to Zepbound and Mounjaro’s combined $14.9 billion. On the Q2 2026 earnings call, CFO Lucas Montarce attributed the margin gain to favorable product mix and improved cost of production, language that points to the higher-margin injectable franchise scaling efficiently, not to a newer, lower-priced oral drug entering the mix. If anything, a bigger Foundayo share of revenue going forward would be a mild drag on blended pricing before it becomes a tailwind, simply because its price points sit so far below Zepbound’s.
So the numbers investors already have in hand tell a clean, separate story: Lilly’s current growth and profitability are being earned by the injectable business that was already dominant a year ago. The market-share flip in oral GLP-1s is a real and fast-moving development, but it hasn’t yet shown up as a dollar figure large enough to explain, let alone justify on its own, a 25% to 45% jump in analyst price targets.
What Would Actually Confirm Foundayo’s Payoff
That gap between the prescription story and the revenue story isn’t a reason to dismiss it. Oral obesity drugs are new enough that a lag between script growth and dollar growth is normal, especially when the newest entrant is priced to win volume first. But it does mean the specific incremental upside Citi and Berenberg are underwriting this week, on top of a stock already up on a genuinely strong quarter, rests on things that haven’t happened yet rather than things the income statement already shows.
Two events would do the most to close that gap. The first is the pending U.S. type 2 diabetes approval, which Lilly said in August it expects later this year; a green light there would open Foundayo to a much larger, better-reimbursed patient population than obesity alone. The second is the international rollout, submitted in more than 40 markets but expected to launch broadly only in 2027, per Lilly international president Patrik Jonsson. Until one or both of those land, Foundayo’s growth is likely to keep looking better in prescriber counts and script share than in revenue, since so much of its current volume runs through self-pay and the $50 Bridge tier rather than full commercial pricing.
The more useful thing for shareholders to watch than this week’s targets is whether Lilly starts breaking out Foundayo revenue with more precision next quarter, and whether gross margin holds near this quarter’s 85.78% high as oral volume keeps scaling. A real dip there would be the first hard evidence that the mix shift toward a cheaper pill is starting to cost the company something, rather than just adding a promising, still-small line to an already dominant injectable franchise.
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Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
