Copenhagen (AFP) – Shares in Danish pharmaceuticals group Novo Nordisk plunged Wednesday after the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy anti-obesity drugs warned of lower sales this year in the key US market. In afternoon trading, the stock was down 18 percent at around 302 kronor ($34) on the Copenhagen stock exchange. The decline has wiped nearly $32 billion off the market value since Tuesday for Novo Nordisk, one of Europe’s biggest companies by capitalisation.
On Tuesday, the company said 2025 sales had risen six percent to 309 billion kronor ($48.9 billion), below the eight to 11 percent gain it had forecast as recently as November. It also said it expected sales to slide by up to 13 percent this year as prices for the popular GLP-1 drugs Ozempic and Wegovy fall in the United States. “Price reduction in some ways is our investment for the future and for capturing more patients,” chief executive Mike Doustdar said while presenting the results.
For Derren Nathan, an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, “Donald Trump’s crusade on drug prices, patent expiration, and competition all had their part to play.” “Underlying guidance (a new and welcome initiative for the company) was for sales and operating profit to fall 5-13 percent this year, causing the immediate erasing of much of the shares’ strong gains so far in 2026,” he noted.
The company had nonetheless announced reason to cheer in December when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Wegovy to be administered in pill form for weight loss, instead of injections. Novo Nordisk now expects a similar approval in Europe in the second half of this year. “The Wegovy pill gives you 16.6 percent weight loss in addition to all the CV [cardiovascular] benefits,” Doustdar said. “This is not just a pill, it’s a peptide, it’s a large protein inside the pill that gives you that incredible efficacy,” he said. “And that has been giving us a lot of optimism and we will, of course, be pushing this through and promoting it.”
© 2024 AFP
