What’s eating Novo Nordisk?
The Ozempic maker’s market cap has more than halved since this time last year.
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?
