Shares of Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk glided 2.5% on Friday, prolonging a 2.7% loss on Thursday as experts read the information of the company’s  first-quarter outcomes and kept an eye on a possible competing weight-loss therapy.
The business reported that sales for its hit injectable weight-loss therapy Wegovy, greater than increased to 9.38 billion Danish kroner ($ 1.4 billion). Novo Nordisk, which additionally makes diabetic issues therapy Ozempic, stated the surge in sales had actually balanced out a small decrease in costs.
Novo Nordisk anticipates costs to go down additionally as brand-new participants get in the marketplace, CFO Karsten Knudsen stated on a media telephone call, including that the business was not seeing much proof of Wegovy individuals transferring to various other competing therapies.
Experts anticipated also greater weight-loss medication sales in the quarter, and some kept in mind that Novo Nordisk’s 2024 overview raising for both sales development and operating earnings resulted from one-off audit changes.
” While we remain to see Novo as a wide-moat company, with solid abstract properties bordering its cardiometabolic service, we believe high weight problems medication need and a shortage of supply have actually driven share costs over their inherent worth,” Karen Andersen, planner at Morningstar, stated in a Thursday note.
The boom popular for weight-loss therapies saw Novo Nordisk surpass French high-end team LVMH to end up being Europe’s the majority of useful business in 2015. Shares got 49% in 2023 and are up 25% year to day.
Sales numbers were “a bit light, assumptions prospered of themselves … and you still have these supply difficulties at Novo,” Jared Holz, health-care equity planner at Mizuho, informed CNBC’s “Quick Cash” on Thursday.
Experts at Stifel cut their target cost on the supply to 950 kroner, below 960 kroner on Friday.
Fat burning medication manufacturers were at the same time extensively reduced after united state firm Amgen stated it was ” extremely happy”  with preliminary test results for its injectable weight problems therapy MariTide.
The possible boost in competitors is hanging over both Novo Nordisk and united state juggernaut Eli Lilly, which additionally increased its overview today, as even more weight-loss gamers arise to shock what has actually greatly been a two-horse race.
Both business are as a result investigating brand-new possible weight-loss therapies to keep a side.
” When we take a look at the whole area, Novo and Lilly are controling due to the fact that they were currently fantastic existing gamers in diabetic issues. This weight problems market is extremely digressive, it’s extremely basic for them to pivot an extremely comparable client populace to weight problems,” Holz stated.
It may be feasible for more recent gamers like Amgen to take 5% to 10% market share with time, or for the completeness of rivals to take 10% of the marketplace, yet the development of Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk is “mosting likely to make it truly hard,” Holz included.
Adjustment: The business reported that sales for Wegovy greater than increased to 9.38 billion Danish kroner ($ 1.4 billion). An earlier variation misstated the united state buck number. Karen Andersen is a planner at Morningstar. An earlier variation misspelled her name.
