By Emil Bjerg, journalist and editor
Thanks to soaring demand for diabetes and obesity drugs Wegovy and Ozempic, Danish drug maker Novo Nordisk is now the biggest company in Europe. In this profile, we cover its challenges and future potential.
In 2023, Jimmy Kimmel opened the Oscars with a reference to Novo Nordisk: “Everybody looks so great. When I look around this room, I can’t help but wonder ‘Is Ozempic right for me?’”
With the commercial introduction of Ozempic and Wegovy, Novo Nordisk has become a reference point in pop culture – while also becoming a global economic power player.
Last year, Novo Nordisk became the biggest European company, surpassing luxury brand LVMH. How did a Danish diabetes drug company achieve that growth and what future challenges and growth potential lies ahead? In this pro le, we cover it all.
Wegovy and Ozempic tap into a massive global market
The origins of Novo Nordisk dates back to 1923, following a trip to Canada by Danish scientist August Krogh and his wife, doctor Marie Krogh, in which they secured permits to produce insulin in Denmark. The pair had a personal investment in getting the permit: Marie Krogh was a diabetic herself, and before the introduction of insulin, diabetes was a deathly disease. In recent years, Novo Nordisk has expanded outside diabetes medications, launching treatments for weight loss and heart diseases.
Novo Nordisk owes its recent success to the medications Ozempic and Wegovy. Ozempic is prescribed to patients seeking to lose weight, while Wegovy is used for diabetes management. The active ingredient in both medications is ‘semaglutide’, a component discovered by Novo Nordisk scientists. Semaglutide mimics a naturally occurring hormone in the body called GLP-1, that helps regulating blood sugar levels by stimulating insulin production, slowing down digestion, and reducing appetite.
In contrast to previous weight loss medications, which have proved largely ine cient, Ozempic actually works. And that opens a massive global market: There are more than one billion obese people in the world, a number still on the rise. “This is going to be one of the biggest, one of the highest demand drugs in the history of pharmaceuticals,” health care specialist Jared Holz recently told CNBC. In the rst six months of 2023, the sales of Ozempic rose by 58%, while that number is a staggering 363% for Wegovy.
Clinical trials a ecting stock prices
As a pharmaceutical company, clinical trials play a massive role in the success of Novo Nordisk. In 2023, a late-stage clinical trial showed that Wegovy reduced the risk of major adverse cardiovascular events by 20% compared to a placebo. The Novo Nordisk stock climbed by 17% that day.
Similarly, in March 2024, Novo Nordisk’s stock surged dramatically after their announcement of positive trial results for their oral new weight-loss drug, amycretin. While clinical trials have mostly had a positive e ect on the perceived value of Novo Nordisk, this also adds an element of volatility to the stock.
Risks, challenges, and critiques
Novo Nordisk is in intense competition with fellow diabetes and weight loss medication company Eli Lilly. Like Novo Nordisk has Ozempic and Wegovy, Eli Lilly has Mounjaro and Trulicity.
Eli Lilly’s active component tirzepatide has proven to be even more e ective than Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide for weight loss. In the US, the FDA recently approved it as a weight loss medication under the name Zepbound. But Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen takes the competition with a stoic calmness: “I like competition because if there’s no competition, there’s a risk that we don’t stay innovative. So we have been competing with Eli Lilly for 100 years,” he says. Their competition in this lucrative space is said to push both companies research and development efforts with Eli Lilly spending 25% of their budget on R&D.
In China, the country in the world with the highest number of obese people, Novo Nordisk is bracing for heightened competition as its patent on semaglutide is set to expire in 2026. Similarly, in 2032 Novo Nordisk’s US patent on semaglutide will expire. With patents disappearing on two of their most lucrative markets, it will be a fundamental challenge for Novo Nordisk to innovate beyond semaglutide.
Also in the US, Novo Nordisk faces criticism for pricing their diabetes medicines at too high a price point. A month of Ozempic costs $969 a month in the US, but just $155 in Canada and $59 a
month in Germany. Novo Nordisk blames the American health care system, arguing, that they only retain around 60% of the sales price of Ozempic and Wegovy after rebates and fees to middlemen. Lars Jørgensen, Novo Nordisk CEO, has recently agreed to testify voluntarily in a US Senate hearing focusing on the company’s US prices.
And then there are the side e ects. While semaglutide is generally considered much safer than earlier weight loss drugs, GLP-1s like semaglutides and Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide have been linked to side e ects like mild nausea and more serious adverse e ects like stomach paralysis, depression, and suicidal thoughts. While the risk of side e ects is low, they do represent a future risk for Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly as well.
One of the biggest challenges according to Novo Nordisk itself? Keeping up with the high global demand. “To be able to support all the of the patients who are diagnosed or would be diagnosed as obese in the US market, you’d have to be able to supply over 50 billion pens,” healthcare stock analyst Seamus Fernandez says. And that’s in the US market alone. According to Novo Nordisk, in 2023 the company invested more than $10 billion in new production facilities, while also operating existing facilities 24/7.
Prospects and potentials
While Novo Nordisk faces several challenges, in the last five years, Novo Nordisk’s stock has grown more than fivefold, sparking a natural interest in what lies ahead for the company.
Market analysts are generally in consensus about the future growth prospects of Novo Nordisk. Among 26 Financial Times analysts, on June 13, 2024, five experts recommended to buy the stock, 13 experts believed that Novo Nordisk’s stock would outperform competition, while nine recommended to hold the stock. Two recommended to sell, and none believed the stock will underperform. The same analysts predicted a 22.03% increase in dividends in the upcoming fiscal year compared to last years dividends.
Ozempic has already become normalized in Hollywood and beyond as a medication for meeting beauty standards. Next up could be the average consumer, experts predict: “After treatments become available for those who need it the most, the next step is likely reaching the average consumer. That is people who want to lose a little extra weight,” healthcare stock analyst Seamus Fernandez says. While consumer products don’t command the same pro t margins that pharmaceutical products do, they can be scaled to a much bigger market, which could become a serious driver for future growth.
At the same time, the market for overweight medications is guaranteed to grow: 1.2 billion people are predicted to be obese by 2030.
But with rising competition and expiring patents, Novo Nordisk will have to innovate outside semaglutide to stay on its successful trajectory. Currently, the drug CagriSema looks like a candidate to compete with Eli Lilly’s Zepbound. CagriSema, a combination formulation of semaglutide and the component cagrilintide, is currently in phase three testing for type 2 diabetes and obesity and initial results look promising. Novo Nordisk is also continuing its research in medications for heart diseases while branching out into drug research for kidney diseases.
Novo Nordisk is actively expanding in rapidly growing markets like Asia-Paci c, Latin America, and Africa, where diabetes and obesity rates are rising. These regions are experiencing signi cant increases in the prevalence of diabetes and obesity due to changing lifestyles, urbanization, and dietary habits.
Finally, Novo Nordisk also expands into technological solutions to enhance patient care and treatment outcomes. The company has developed digital health platforms and mobile applications tailored to support diabetes and obesity management. Novo Nordisk work with three categories: optimize, augment and explore. With optimize, the company looks into how they “can use data, automation, and robotics to enhance our processes”. Augment means to Novo Nordisk to improve “outcomes for patients using treatments and tools that incorporate drugs, diagnostics, devices, digital, and data”. Explore “is about leveraging digital to create value for our patients independent of the drug, as well as partnering with start-ups and institutions to invest in and scale in the area of holistic care.”
And so, with heavy competition, Novo Nordisk continues to innovate from drug discoveries to product optimization.
Healing Through Words: A Journey of Love, Betrayal, and Forgiveness: Interview with Len Prazych
Len Prazych talks about his recent book, the writing of which was motivated partly by his own personal quest for healing. Here, he discusses the inspiration behind the book, the challenges of writing about trauma, and the book’s part in the healing process.
Your book, My Fathers: Letters of Healing on a Quest for the Truth, is an incredibly personal memoir. What inspired you to write this book and share your story with the public?
The inspiration to write the book was born out of the emotional pain of holding on to a dark family secret for nearly half a century! I’ve studied the power of writing to heal and thought that writing the book, while grieving my recently deceased father, was a healthy and therapeutic way to do this. I was correct!
I was also inspired to help others who may have been the victims of sexual abuse (by Catholic priests and anyone else) in suggesting how telling their story and sharing their pain, no matter how long it’s been since the abuse took place – it may still be happening – will help with their emotional and spiritual healing. It may also help to see justice be served, the abusers be identified and, in some cases, receive damages through the courts via civil or criminal charges.
Finally, I want my story to be a reminder to everyone that “if you see something, say something”. I want parents to talk to their children, to tell them the truth about abuse, not shield them from it or sweep it under the rug as “something we don’t talk about in our family”.
The process of writing about trauma can be both cathartic and painful. Were there particular moments or chapters that were especially difficult to write, and how did you overcome those challenges?
The moments and chapters that were more difficult to write were the ones during which I continued to process and understand the heavier events, for example, realising that my biological father experienced the trauma as a 12-year-old (about the same age I was when I experienced my trauma) of finding his father hanging from a rafter in the basement after his suicide. I had to take a break in my writing, usually for a couple of days before picking up again. Or, in my attempt to avoid the “hard stuff”, I would move on to another, less delicate part of the book. Ultimately, I knew I just had to keep on writing.
How did your perception of your biological father and the priest change over the course of writing this memoir? Did you discover anything unexpected about them or yourself?
Like my grandfather’s suicide and other events of my biological father’s life that shaped him into become the father he was (or wasn’t) to me, I found myself releasing some of my anger and becoming more compassionate and feeling sorry for him. This led to my understanding him more, as well as how and why my incident happened. The subsequent gaslighting and silence inflicted more pain and anger, but time and understanding help me to somewhat forgive but certainly not forget.
Before I wrote my book, I’ve studied paedophile priests, Catholic and otherwise, to understand their motivations and behaviours. As criminal and contemptible as my priest and others like him were, I realised that I am more upset at the institution – the Catholic Church – at being complicit in allowing the abuse of thousands of other boys to continue, sometimes over decades, by moving priests from place to place, “scrubbing” their evil pasts, protecting their privacy and protecting their own.
My Fathers deals with heavy themes of love, betrayal, and forgiveness. What message do you hope readers take away regarding these themes?
That when you love, you risk the pain of losing that love and suffering, which is all part of the human experience. Understanding that even those we place on the highest pedestals – parents and priests, for example – can hurt and disappoint us in very profound ways. And, yes, forgiveness is hard, if not impossible for some, but the sooner you can try to overcome the trauma of betrayal and move on with your life, the sooner you’ll be able to try to allow yourself to love – and be loved – again.
Healing and understanding are central themes in your book. Can you share some specific ways in which you found healing and what advice you would give to others on a similar journey?
My healing journey was enhanced by compassion, which allowed me to lose enough anger to allow understanding to creep in. The act of journalling and writing about it all, which ultimately resulted in my writing my memoir, combined with professional psychotherapy, were critical parts of my journey, as were having a supportive spouse and a core group of friends willing to provide a sympathetic ear. When I no longer wanted to unburden my “stuff” on my spouse and friends because there is only so much they can be expected to bear, a support group of other abuse victims was helpful. My final advice is to be patient; healing is not a linear process, and everyone grieves and heals in different ways. It takes time and work. You need to trust that if you put in the time and do the work, whatever that may be (maybe writing a book!), you will find healing.
Since the publication of your book, have you received any feedback from readers who have had similar experiences? How has their response impacted you and your view of your memoir?
Yes, I’ve gotten feedback from readers who have had similar experiences and I’ve been applauded for my courage in writing the book and putting such a sensitive topic out there for public consumption, acknowledging my pain and anger and always, always looking for the truth.
After others have said, “I’m so sorry you had to deal with this, I never knew,” some immediately shared their own memories, tales of betrayal, parental conflicts, or past trauma. Not only do I welcome these comments, but I’m also encouraging them. These are the memories that need to be shared, the stories that need to be told, the conversations that need to be had, and sometimes, the pain that has to be released, along with a measure of forgiveness.
My initial apprehensions about writing the book and the negative reception it might receive from those who have too much of their emotional lives invested in keeping dark family messages and secrets intact were quickly dispelled by comments of others who shared their encouragement, support and, sometimes, inspiration to share their own secret, write their own letter (or book), which I’m offering them the help to do.
It’s only been six months since I launched the book, but I’m confident I made the right decision to do so. I’m seeing regularly (with interviews and publicity like this!) the potential of it to do more to help others suffering with whatever pain they’re in to find some level of healing by writing and talking about it.
Executive Profile
Len Prazych has been a professional writer for most of his adult life. He received his master’s degree in The Psychology of Narrative, during which he researched and experienced the remarkable power of writing to heal physically and emotionally, which helped him through the experience he had when he was 11, which he shares in My Fathers: Letters of Healing on a Quest for the Truth, his first book. Born and raised in New Jersey, he now lives in upstate New York, USA.