Sherwood News

What’s eating Novo Nordisk?

The Ozempic maker’s market cap has more than halved since this time last year.

7/30/25 9:26AM

Last July, Novo Nordisk, the drugmaker that brought us Ozempic and Wegovy, was sitting pretty as Europe’s most valuable company — and, with a margin of more than $200 billion between it and storied luxury house LVMH, it wasn’t even really close. A lot can change in a year.

Weighed down

Since peaking just shy of $660 billion last summer, Novo has been shedding market cap almost nonstop. Yesterday, shares ended up posting their steepest single-day drop in the Danish behemoth’s history, sliding 23% after the company slashed its sales and profit outlook for the year ahead. Now, Novo’s new CEO, a veteran insider who was announced with the slimmed-down outlook yesterday, will have his work cut out to stop the bleeding.

If 2024 was the year that GLP-1s “took over,” Ozempic (launched in the US in 2017) was very much leading the charge, having amassed enough cultural weight to serve as the poster child for the new wave of obesity treatments.

Since then, however, offerings from Eli Lilly, as well as stiff competition from compounders like Hims & Hers and Noom, have started to muscle in on Novo’s leading Ozempic and Wegovy drugs. Notably, Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound have proven to be more effective for weight loss with fewer side effects, according to reporting from the Financial Times.

Nouveau problems

Much is made of first-mover advantage in business, but Novo might just be the latest in a long list of cautionary tales — MySpace, BlackBerry, Yahoo Search, Zoom, Peloton — that proves being early isn’t always enough. With new GLP-1 effort CagriSema disappointing across trials in December and March, it’s not just Novo that’s feeling the pain; the company’s slumping sales are hurting Denmark’s national export figures, too.

Go Deeper: How the Novo Nordisk-Hims & Hers partnership epically flopped in just two months | Is Ozempic old news?

Luke Kawa

Super Micro crushes estimates for Q2, offers strong guidance

The AI server company just released its fiscal Q2 results.

J. Edward Moreno4h

Chipotle beats Q4 estimates, but sinks on underwhelming full-year guidance

Chipotle reported earnings results that beat Wall Street estimates, but gave underwhelming full-year guidance.

For the last three months of 2025, Chipotle reported:

Adjusted earnings per share of $0.25, compared to the $0.24 analysts polled by FactSet were expecting.
Revenue of $3 billion, a bit higher than the $2.9 billion the Street was penciling in.
A comparable-store sales decline of 2.5%, less than the 2.9% decline the Street was expecting.

For the full year in 2026, Chipotle expects:

Comparable-store sales to be flat, compared to the 1.7% growth analysts were expecting.

Chipotle has struggled to spark sales over the past year and has previously cited strained consumers as a major headwind. The company fell more than 9% in after-hours trading shortly after the report was released.

Max Knoblauch4h

Take-Two raises its net bookings outlook, reaffirms November release for “Grand Theft Auto 6”

“Grand Theft Auto” and “NBA 2K” maker Take-Two reported results for its fiscal third quarter on Tuesday. Its shares climbed about 4% in after-hours trading.

The company posted net bookings, or the amount customers spent on its products, of $1.76 billion, up 28% from the same quarter last year. Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet expected $1.58 billion. In November, Take-Two guided for Q3 net bookings of between $1.55 billion and $1.6 billion.

Take-Two hiked its full-year bookings outlook to between $6.65 billion and $6.7 billion, up from a range of $6.4 billion to $6.5 billion. The new outlook compares to Wall Street’s $6.47 billion estimate. The gaming giant trimmed its full-year net loss guidance to between $369 million and $338 million (prior guidance: between $414 million and $349 million).

In its last quarter, Take-Two pushed back the planned release date of “Grand Theft Auto 6” from May 2026 to November 19, 2026. The company reaffirmed that date in Tuesday’s report. The game’s last trailer came in May 2025.

Shares of Take-Two and other major gaming companies have been sinking since late last week as investors react to early showcases of Google’s Project Genie, which allows users to generate interactive, “playable” worlds with a text or image prompt. As of Tuesday’s close, Take-Two has shed nearly $6 billion in market cap since Project Genie was released.

Analysts have called the market reaction unjustified, saying that the tool doesn’t allow for meaningful interactivity or replay-ability. According to mBank analyst Piotr Poniatowski, Project Genie is — at the moment — essentially a “one-minute-long walking simulator generator.”

Luke Kawa

AMD posts big beat in Q4 with sunny Q1 sales guidance

The No. 2 in GPUs just reported its fourth-quarter results.