Novo Nordisk to replace the CEO after he has lost the edge in weight loss medication
Novo Nordisk will replace his managing director Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the company on Friday with a severe decline in his share price, which resulted from the increasing competition for his popular weight loss medication.
The Danish drug maker said that he was looking for a new managing director who soon replaced Mr. Jorgensen, who led Novo Nordisk for eight years.
The move reflects a remarkable loss of assets for the manufacturer of one of the best -known drugs in the world that is sold as an Ozempic for diabetes and for obesity as Wegovy. The company's share dropped by 50 percent last year.
The sales of weight loss drugs created boom times for Novo Nordisk. In 2023, the company's extraordinary success prompted the Danish central bank to keep interest rates lower than usual. For more than a year, the market value of Novo Nordisk Denmark has exceeded entire gross domestic product.
But investors have committed themselves for the company because it was more and more violent. Sub -cost imitators, which were carried out by a process known as compounding, have entered into the turnover of Novo Nordisk. The competition of Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of the drug, which was sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound, was even more harmful.
Novo Nordisk had a lead and won the approval of marketing his medication more than two years before Eli Lilly against obesity. But Novo Nordisk quickly lost his competitor to the market share: American patients have completed more recipes for Zepbound than for Wegovy this year, and the gap has expanded, according to the industry data provider IQvia.
The weight loss medication, a class of medication known as GLP-1, have become very popular because they help patients lose much more weight than previous treatments. However, employers who offer health insurance were overwhelmed by the costs of obese medications for their workers, and some have refused to cover them.
In most cases, Medicare does not pay the medication for the treatment of obesity. The Trump administration recently rejected a bidden plan, which would have expanded access. In most cases, patients who pay for the medication without insurance out of their own pocket can receive them for 500 US dollars per month.
The market for weight loss medication will change in the coming years.
Eli Lilly develops new weight loss medication, including a daily pill that is expected to set up blockbuster sales for the company for years.
Novo Nordisk has a thicker path forward. In some countries, but not in the United States, generic versions of Ozempic and Wegovy could already be available next year.
The company has advertised the regulatory approval for the marketing of a daily pills version of the drug for the treatment of obesity, but this product alone is not expected that the company's assets are turning away. Novo Nordisk also develops a new drug, Cagrisema, which is to be injected for less frequently, but the results of the clinical study have disappointed because the participants have not lost as much weight as hoped.
