Good morning. Eli Lilly and Company has promoted longtime executive Lucas Montarce to the role of CFO. The move is similar to the career path of his predecessor, Anat Ashkenazi, who also spent two decades at Lilly before becoming finance chief.
The Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company announced on Monday that Montarce, whose tenure at Lilly extends 23 years, is executive vice president and chief financial officer, effective immediately. Montarce succeeds Ashkenazi who left the company to become SVP and CFO of Google and Alphabet, beginning her tenure on July 31.
Montarce joined Lilly, a Fortune 500 company, in 2001. He most recently served in the role of president and general manager for the Spain, Portugal, and Greece hub. And before that, he served in roles such as group VP, corporate controller and CFO of Lilly Research Laboratories, VP of finance and CFO of Lilly International, and VP of finance and global CFO of Elanco Health (a former subsidiary of Lilly).
"Developing leadership talent has always been a strength for Lilly, and Lucas has thrived in a wide variety of roles of increasing scope and impact,” David A. Ricks, chair and CEO, said in a statement, which added that Montarce was chosen after a competitive search across health care, tech, and general industries.
Ashkenazi was CFO at Lilly from 2021 until leaving the company this summer. Like Montarce, she joined Lilly in 2001. During her tenure, she served in roles including SVP, controller, and CFO of Lilly Research Laboratories. She led the corporate strategy team and business transformation office. In addition, Ashkenazi served as CFO for several of the company’s global business areas.
“One piece of advice I give new hires or people starting their career is to keep a flexible mindset as it comes to your career because you’ll learn things about yourself as you progress,” Ashkenazi told me last year.
The pharmaceutical industry, in general, can be complex with many challenges. “Large pharmaceutical companies often prioritize promoting internal candidates for executive roles to ensure continuity and leverage institutional knowledge,” Shawn Cole, president and founding partner of Cowen Partners, a C-suite-focused executive search firm, told me. “Their size allows them to build a deep bench of qualified talent.” Cole added, though, that pharma firms may also bolster their team with external hires from competitors to gain fresh perspectives.
There were serious concerns about the future of Lilly just over a decade ago, Erika Fry notes in an article for Fortune. But today it is on an upswing that has seen it become the ninth most valuable company in the world, while returning this year to the Fortune Global 500 list. It also had record-breaking sales of $34.1 billion in 2023. “The big story for Lilly, the main reason for its stratospheric $791 billion market cap—which makes it more valuable than Tesla, Exxon Mobil, and its fiercest pharma rival, Novo Nordisk, by the way—is the absolute mania (the Lilly-palooza?) that surrounds the company’s weight-loss drug, tirzepatide," Fry writes.
Tirzepatide hit the market as the diabetes medication Mounjaro in May 2022, and was “poised to crush the market’s ‘gorilla,’ semaglutide, which Novo markets as Ozempic and Wegovy,” she writes.
As CFO, Montarce will receive a base salary of $1 million and will be eligible for an annualized target bonus of $1 million. He’s now at the helm of finance at a time when the company is spending billions to expand its manufacturing capacity to produce Mounjaro and Zepbound, a weight-loss drug. Lilly announced in May that it has more than doubled its investment in a Lebanon, Indiana, manufacturing site with a new $5.3 billion commitment.
"I am honored to step into this role during such a significant time in our company's history,” Montarce said in a statement.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
The following sections of CFO Daily were curated by Greg McKenna
