In its annual briefing for Wall Streeters, the drugmaker offers sobering forecasts for next year and, meanwhile, will post a loss this year thanks to more than $4 billion in charges stemming from its $6.5 billion deal to buy ImClone Systems. “The pharmaceutical industry,” Lilly ceo John Lechleiter reminds the crowd,” continues to face major challenges.”

Next year, revenue will grow in the low single digits, and the drugmaker pointed to the Cymbalta antidepressant, the Cialis impotence pill and its Prasugrel blood thinner, for which Lilly hopes to win FDA approval next year after recent delays (back story). Analysts reportedly forecast 7 percent to $22 billion. Margins are expected to increase “substantially,” thanks to the stronger dollar.

Lilly, which follows Merck as the second big drugmaker this week to lower next year’s expectations, projected 2009 earnings of $4.35 to $4.55 a share, compared with analyst projections of $4.26. Meanwhile, the drugmaker says it halfway to meeting its goal of cutting the cost of bringing a new drug to market to $800 million by 2010 from $1.2 billion in 2007. Toward that end, Lilly recently sold its Greenfield Laboratories site to Covance (here is the Lilly statement).

And like Merck, Lilly execs say they are also considering a foray into biogenerics, or follow-on biologics. Steven Paul, president of Lilly Research Laboratories, tells Reuters that getting into biogenerics is “a very reasonable thing for Lilly to do, probably down the road.”