Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical corporate in the back of Ozempic and Wegovy, capped off a relatively windy 2024, reporting benefit and earnings on Wednesday that very easily beat Wall Boulevard expectancies. However the drugmaker stated it anticipated gross sales enlargement to gradual in 2025, as festival will increase.
Novo Nordisk retains its title as Europe’s most valuable company, however its proportion value has dropped about 40 % because it peaked closing June as analysts have apprehensive about indecision in call for for weight problems medication and the efficiency of brandnew medication in trials.
“Last year was a tale of two halves,” stated Emily Ground, an analyst at Barclays. The primary part of 2024 introduced “lots of overall excitement.”
However upcoming information instructed that prescriptions for weight problems medication have been rising slowly in the US, and a couple of trial effects for medication within the corporate’s pipeline got here in not up to anticipated, Ms. Ground added. President Trump’s election additionally weighed on pharmaceutical firms generally amid doable adjustments to fitness aid coverage.
There was “a lot of uncertainty,” she stated, as traders have grown extra occupied with whether or not gross sales of weight problems medication may actually meet the industry’s lofty expectations of a marketplace better than $100 billion within the coming a long time. Novo Nordisk’s main competitor is the American drugmaker Eli Lilly, which additionally sells weight problems medication.
On Wednesday, Novo Nordisk stated its revenue jumped 25 percent last year to 290 billion Danish kroner, or $40.6 billion, pushed by means of rising gross sales in the US, and reported benefit of greater than 100 billion Danish kroner.
It expects gross sales enlargement of 16 to 24 % in 2025, not up to the former presen, on account of expanding festival and pricing pressures. However the corporate stated it used to be nonetheless vision robust call for for weight problems therapies.
“The number of people living with obesity is very, very large, so this is a market we are just starting to serve,” Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the drugmaker’s eminent government, stated on a choice with newshounds on Wednesday. The 2025 steerage assumes “a quite significant ramp” in gross sales in the US, he added.
The corporate’s proportion value rose about 5 % on Wednesday.
Novo Nordisk has been again and again thrust into the limelight in contemporary weeks by means of Mr. Trump and his brandnew management.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has stated he doesn’t like weight problems medication, is Mr. Trump’s nominee for fitness secretary, a submit that might give him some power over get right of entry to to the medicine. And closing week, Mr. Trump threatened tariffs on Denmark, Novo Nordisk’s home country, in a spat over Greenland. Novo Nordisk producers a few of its medication in the US, however it nonetheless imports the energetic pharmaceutical component, semaglutide, for a few of its maximum prevalent injectable medication.
Karsten Munk Knudsen, the corporate’s eminent monetary officer, stated in an interview on Wednesday that the corporate had a batch of optimism for 2025. However “we are not naïve in terms of everything that’s happening around us,” he added. “Geopolitics is probably more volatile currently as compared to what it’s been in the past few years.”
Within the day few weeks, the blackmails and imposition of price lists have created a batch of indecision for trade leaders all over the world. Even if Mr. Trump suspension price lists on items from Canada and Mexico this hour, he proceeded with backup price lists on Chinese language items and warned that tariffs on the European Union would “definitely happen.”
Novo Nordisk started this presen improving from the disappointing trial results of its next-generation weight reduction drug CagriSema. Later a late-stage trial moderately neglected expectancies, the corporate’s proportion value plunged 20 % on a unmarried pace in overdue December. However Mr. Jorgensen stated the corporate remained “confident in the biology of CagriSema.”
Novo Nordisk additionally stated it anticipated to record for the primary regulatory esteem of CagriSema in early 2026. Endmost week, effects for an early-stage trial of a brandnew drug, amycretin, carried out neatly, pushing up the corporate’s stocks.
