(Bloomberg) -- Eli Lilly & Co.’s fourth-quarter revenue fell short of analysts’ estimates as its popular weight-loss and diabetes shots disappointed investors for the second consecutive quarter.

Overall quarterly sales are expected to be $13.5 billion, Lilly said Tuesday in preliminary results, below the $14 billion average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. Both Zepbound for obesity and Mounjaro for diabetes came in below projections.

Lilly said the market for the shots grew slower than anticipated in the final three months of the year and inventory was lower than anticipated. It’s the second straight quarterly sales miss that the company has blamed on inventory issues, raising concerns about overall sales expectations.

“With the sort of growth the market expects for Lilly, they have very little room for error,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst John Murphy said.

Shares of the Indianapolis-based drugmaker fell as much as 8.6% Tuesday in New York, their biggest intraday slump since Oct. 30. They had gained 32% in 2024. Shares of weight-loss rival Novo Nordisk A/S lost as much as 4% in Denmark.

2025 Forecast

“Although this is the second quarter in a row of disappointing results, we expect 2025+ financial performance and pipeline newsflow” to be positive, Leerink Partners analyst David Risinger said in a note, reiterating his outperform rating.

Lilly forecast 2025 revenue in the range of $58 billion to $61 billion, compared with analysts’ average estimate of $58.7 billion.

The company had said in its third-quarter conference call that wholesalers’ difficulty with stocking a variety of different doses of its vaunted drugs hurt sales by a mid-single-digits percentage.

In an interview at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Chief Executive Officer Dave Ricks said the drugmaker normally sells more product in December, as patients double up on prescriptions ahead of the holidays and deductible resets in January. “But we did not see that,” he said.

“Our guidance relied on a bit of a bump up, which we had seen the last four or five years in December,” Ricks said. “It just didn’t occur.”

The fourth-quarter revenue miss was “well-telegraphed” by the company, according to Mizuho health specialist Jared Holz. “This remains best story in large-cap pharma near-term.”

(Updates with analyst comment starting in fifth paragraph.)