Business
The weight-loss drug revolution looks like a winner for Ireland’s economy
DCM Editorial Summary: This story has been independently rewritten and summarised for DCM readers to highlight key developments relevant to the region. Original reporting by Irish Times, click this post to read the original article.
Smartphone sales eclipsed PC sales in 2011, making the smartphone the primary computing platform on the planet. Officials here can be forgiven for not seeing the import of this shift in the technology cycle.
The State was enmeshed in a financial crisis, predicated on the biggest percentage peak-to-trough fall in house prices recorded anywhere in the world. The glory days of the Celtic Tiger had reverted back to 1980s-style emigration and unemployment. The mood in the country was sour.
It wasn’t evident back then that Ireland would ride this smartphone revolution back to prosperity.
Within five years, unemployment, which had ballooned to over 16 per cent, would be halved, national income would increase by more than 60 per cent and the public finances would be almost back in surplus.
This rapid economic turnaround wasn’t down to one company or one sector. But multinational exports with Apple’s iPhone at the centre played a significant role.
Apple was among the first major technology groups to bet on Ireland – establishing a base here in 1980 – a move that was no doubt linked to tax and access to the EU’s rich consumer market, but this has had a clustering effect.
Other companies like Google and Meta (also major beneficiaries of the smartphone revolution) have followed suit.
Apple is among the State’s largest private sector employers, employing over 6,000 staff mainly at its Cork campus.
There’s no single item that generates more tax wealth for the Government than the iPhone.
The company channels profits generated from global (non-US) sales through its Cork-based subsidiary Apple Operations International Limited. In 2024, it paid approximately €5.8 billion in corporate tax here.
Apple, more than any other company, catalysed the smartphone revolution, inadvertently placing Ireland at the centre of it.
The State might be about to ride another technology gear change, this time in the form of weight-loss medicines, or GLP-1s as they’re known in the industry.
The global market for these drugs is expected to swell to $150 billion (€127 billion) by 2030 (some think that’s a conservative estimate) and the leading player has decided to base a significant tranche of its supply chain here.
Eli Lilly manufactures the ingredients for its top selling drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound medications at a factory in Kinsale.
Originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes, these drugs have now been expanded to treat the biggest health epidemic on the planet: obesity.
Having been on an upward trajectory for decades (hitting a record 39.9 per cent in 2022), the US adult obesity rate declined to 37 per cent in 2025, according to the Gallup National Health and Wellbeing Index, a decline that’s been linked almost entirely to these new drugs.
“This is a statistically meaningful decrease representing an estimated 7.6 million fewer obese adults compared with three years ago,” Gallup said.
Despite the impact from Donald Trump’s tariffs, Irish goods exports spiked last year largely on the back of Eli Lilly shipping ingredients to the US.
The pharma giant shipped $42.3 billion (€36.4 billion) of these ingredients in the first four months of 2025.
This was initially put down to a strategic front-loading of product to avoid tariffs.
But several contributors at a recent conference hosted by the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (Ifac) wondered if we might instead be seeing a level shift in these exports linked to an explosion in demand for the company’s drugs.
The company has recently reconfigured a second $2 billion facility in Limerick – originally earmarked to make Alzheimer’s medicines – to produce these weight-loss ingredients. The facility is due to commence production this year.
The company’s needle-free oral weight-loss pill, Orforglipron, is also set to get regulatory approval in 2026, which could further accelerate demand.
This week Eli Lilly’s main rival in the market, Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic, unveiled late-stage data results for its next-generation weight-loss drug CagriSema, that not only showed it underperforming Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, but appeared to show weight loss with Zepbound was better than even some of Eli Lilly’s own data had shown.
In response to the news, Novo Nordisk’s shares fell 16 per cent while Eli Lilly shares increased by 5 per cent.
Indiana-headquartered Eli Lilly paid approximately €2.2 billion in corporation tax here in 2024, making the third biggest corporate tax payer behind Apple and Microsoft. Subsequent US filings by the company suggest its tax liability here almost tripled to $6.6 billion (€5.6 billion) last year, a figure that was well ahead of its US liability.
The much-warned-about concentration risk at the heart of the exchequer and the economy here emanates from a string of devices, services and blockbuster drugs which, for now, the companies involved have decided to make here.
But patents lapse. Newer technologies replace older ones and consumer tastes change.
We can’t be sure these trends will continue to go Ireland’s way but for now the economy remains on a winning streak.
