(Reuters) -Eli Lilly raised its full-year 2021 profit and sales expectations on Wednesday, helped partly by a recent U.S. government contract for its COVID-19 antibody treatment.
Shares of the drugmaker were up 2.3% in premarket trading after it also forecast 2022 profit in the range of $8.50 to $8.65, above analysts estimates of $8.18.
Last month, the U.S. government bought 614,000 additional doses of its COVID-19 antibody therapy, a cocktail of bamlanivimab and etesevimab, for $1.29 billion.
The U.S. government had bought 388,000 additional doses of Lilly’s antibody therapy in September, when infections surged due to the fast-spreading Delta variant
The company said it now expected COVID-19 therapies to bring in about $2.1 billion in sales in 2021, up from an earlier forecast of $1.3 billion.
Lilly said it expects adjusted earnings per share to between $8.15 and $8.20, up from an earlier range of between $7.95 and $8.05.
The company said it expects 2021 revenue to be in the range of $28.0 billion to $28.3 billion, compared with its previous forecast of $27.2 billion to $27.6 billion.
(Reporting by Mrinalika Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Anil D’Silva)
