2026년 2월 6일 · Unknown · financial · 출처 Yahoo Finance
(Bloomberg) -- Just last month, Novo Nordisk A/S shares seemed to be turning a corner. Analysts were optimistic about the pill version of the Danish drugmaker’s blockbuster Wegovy obesity shot, while investors seemed to have priced in any weakness in the former market darling’s sales outlook.
This week, the narrative has been flipped on its head. Novo shares have plunged 21%, hit first by guidance for a much steeper-than-expected decline in revenue, and then the launch by telehealth firm Hims & Hers Health Inc. of a cheaper copycat version of the Wegovy weight-loss pill. Even after a slight rally on Friday, the shares are still on track for their worst week in six months.
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The setbacks are just the latest to afflict the Danish company, which has seen years of dizzying gains wiped out since its market value peaked at $659 billion in June 2024. Not long ago, Novo was Europe’s most valuable listed company, but it has quickly fallen outside the top 10, now worth little more than $200 billion. The dramatic plunge has prompted some to question whether the foray into weight-loss treatments has been worth it.
“There is no doubt in my mind that Novo shares would be higher today” if it never got into obesity, said Mizuho health-care specialist Jared Holz.
Once a niche maker of insulin, Novo attracted increased attention when its Ozempic shot — originally developed to treat diabetes — became popular among Hollywood celebrities looking to stay trim. The company took the active ingredient of Ozempic, semaglutide, and rebranded it as Wegovy to be used specifically for weight loss. US regulators approved the Wegovy shot in June 2021, helping the stock’s rapid ascent.
But despite Novo’s first-mover advantage, it misjudged the speed and scale of the competition. It’s been losing ground to US archrival Eli Lilly & Co. — which started selling its Zepbound weight-loss drug in late 2023 — and has also come under pressure from lower-cost copies of Lilly’s and Novo’s products.
“Price is an important element of how much volume gets untangled in this business, no doubt about it,” Mike Doustdar, Novo Nordisk’s chief executive officer, told analysts on Thursday. “We first saw that with the compounders.”
According to Doustdar, people were buying knock-off products “not because they don’t want the original, it’s because they couldn’t afford the original. And then we saw how much and how fast they have been able to penetrate.”
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Novo shares had their worst year on record in 2025 amid intense competition in the obesity-drug market, disappointing clinical trial results and multiple profit warnings. That left the stock to trade as if the craze surrounding obesity drugs never happened.
The launch of the Wegovy pill was supposed to help Novo gain an edge, and the share rebound in January was the stock’s biggest gain in five months. But then the weak sales forecast hit, followed by Hims & Hers Health’s Thursday announcement of its knock-off version of the pill, offering it at a lower price than Novo’s product. The Danish company said it plans to take legal and regulatory action.
The shares had already plunged 10% intraday by the time Novo made its statement, though JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst Richard Vosser sees that decline ultimately reversing. “There are strong legal routes for Novo to follow to remove the product from the market,” he wrote in a note, adding that Hims’ copycat is “clearly in violation of the regulations governing drugs in the US.”
In a post on X Thursday night, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said his agency will take “swift action against companies mass-marketing illegal copycat drugs, claiming they are similar to FDA-approved products.”
Novo rose as much as 5.8% on Friday, recouping some of this week’s losses, but there’s a long way to go for the shares to recover. Less than half of the 34 analysts tracked by Bloomberg have a buy rating or equivalent, and not even the most bullish among them sees the stock returning to its record high level over the next 12 months.
“What happened last year to us was a great learning that this obesity market is more dynamic than at least we had felt or known,” Novo’s Doustdar said.
--With assistance from Beth Mellor and Subrat Patnaik.
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