Pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly promoted Lucas Montarce to CFO, effective immediately, according to a company announcement. Montarce takes over after the company’s former finance chief Anat Ashkenazi left for the CFO job at Alphabet in June.
In its push to corner the market on GLP-1 drugs, Eli Lilly’s leadership could be interested in Montarce’s extensive global internal leadership experience, combined with his recent financial leadership role in an area that has been a rapidly growing expenditure for the company over recent years. From March 2021 to January 2024, Montarce served as group vice president, global controller and CFO of Lilly Research.
According to Montarce’s LinkedIn, he has held 13 different positions at Eli Lilly since joining the company in April 2001 as a treasury senior analyst. Since then, he has gone on to hold divisional CFO roles worldwide.
While his most recent position was president and general manager of the company’s Spain, Portugal and Greece businesses, he has worked in divisional CFO roles in the company’s Central America and Caribbean market, Latin America, Central Europe (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) and the United States.
On a recent earnings call, interim CFO Gordon Brooks spoke extensively about the company’s efforts to allocate resources toward research and development, as well as its patience in evaluating the results of those efforts.
Brooks was not mentioned in the company’s announcement but he was promoted to group vice president of controller and strategy in May, according to LinkedIn. Like Montarce, Brooks has been with Eli Lilly for more than two decades. In July, Brooks will mark 30 years with the company.
