Novo Nordisk Chief Executive Mike Doustdar, who took over in 2025 promising to find a sustainable growth path, said the company will launch several new blockbusters over the next few years but investors aren’t yet convinced the Danish drugmaker is close to finding its next Ozempic.
Novo’s shares were down roughly 6% on Monday during the company’s investor day in London.
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Doustdar said Novo’s revenue was expected to grow roughly in line with other large drugmakers through the end of this decade. Investors were looking for guidance into 2032, when Ozempic and Wegovy, which made up two-thirds of sales last year, are expected to lose patent protection in the U.S.
“When you compare it with Glaxo or with Astra or with Novartis, they gave guidance through the big patent expiration cycle,” said Markus Manns, a portfolio manager at Union Investment, which holds shares in both Novo and its rival Eli Lilly. “But we are still up in the air about how we should feel.”
Novo’s management outlined a plan to develop new drugs in their core areas of obesity and diabetes as well as in newer areas like sickle-cell disease and a heart condition known as ATTR-cardiomyopathy.
In addition to at least five new “multi-blockbusters,” the company is aiming to have at least five new obesity and diabetes drugs and a similar number of drugs in other therapeutic areas in late-stage trials by 2030.
At the event, Doustdar referred to the patent cliff as the “elephant in the room” and said the company doesn’t underestimate the price pressure that comes with it. But, he said, lower prices are driving higher demand in some markets.
Semaglutide, the main ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, is already off patent in Canada, India, Brazil and Turkey, and is losing exclusivity in China this year.
“It’s not that one loses it to the generics fully,” Doustdar said. “Yes, the price might go down by 50%, but there is much higher volume.”
That didn’t give investors much confidence. Novo’s shares are down nearly 20% year-to-date and 72% from its all-time high in June 2024.
With Ozempic and Wegovy, Novo is competing with Eli Lilly to dominate the multibillion-dollar weight-loss drug market. Lilly has established dominance in the space with its Mounjaro and Zepbound products, though Novo’s newer Wegovy pill has had a strong start.
Seamus Fernandez, an analyst at Guggenheim Securities, said in a note to investors that the pipeline showed limited differentiation and few genuinely new assets, adding that with the exception of weight-loss pills, Novo’s portfolio looks to be several years behind Lilly.
The company’s plan also targets the delivery of over 150 billion Danish kroner—equivalent to roughly $23 billion—in sales from its pipeline drugs in 2035. The company’s 2025 total sales were 309.06 billion kroner.
The target was “conservative and a bit disappointing,” relative to existing expectations, Fernandez wrote.
Evan Seigerman, BMO Capital Markets analyst, said the share price decrease was likely attributable to the fact that today’s projections weren’t a surprise. “The burden of proof remains,” he wrote.
Novo has ceded its lead in the injectable weight-loss market to its U.S. rival, but its recently launched weight-loss pills are proving popular and have given Novo an early lead in the new market. Doustdar has previously said that the early signs give him hope that the Wegovy pill could help the company regain some of its lost market share.
Novo expects the launch of generic drugs to hit sales this year and has said that a deal struck with the Trump administration to lower prices in the U.S. will hurt results. Its most recent guidance points to an adjusted sales decline of up to 6% at constant exchange rates this year.
The company has faced other setbacks that have disappointed investors. Trial results from an experimental cardiovascular drug didn’t show the expected risk reduction for heart attack or stroke, while its next-generation obesity and diabetes drug CagriSema disappointed in terms of lowering blood sugar when compared with Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Mounjaro and Zepbound, according to analysts.
Doustdar took charge of the company last year and has overseen an initial flurry of acquisitions and a boardroom shake-up while announcing plans to slash 9,000 jobs under a new restructuring effort. He told The Wall Street Journal last month that he would continue looking for potential assets to buy that could complement the company’s pipeline while ruling out large transformative deals.
Write to Alex Janin at alex.janin@wsj.com and Dominic Chopping at dominic.chopping@wsj.com
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