Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company behind Ozempic and Wegovy, capped off a somewhat turbulent 2024, reporting profit and revenue on Wednesday that comfortably beat Wall Street expectations. But the drugmaker said it expected sales growth to slow in 2025, as competition increases.
Novo Nordisk retains its title as Europe’s most valuable company, but its share price has dropped about 40 percent since it peaked last June as analysts worried about uncertainty in demand for obesity drugs and the performance of new drugs in trials.
“Last year was a tale of two halves,” said Emily Field, an analyst at Barclays. The first half of 2024 offered “lots of overall excitement.”
But then data suggested that prescriptions for obesity drugs were growing slowly in the United States, and a few trial results for drugs in the company’s pipeline came in lower than expected, Ms. Field added. President Trump’s election also weighed on pharmaceutical companies in general amid potential changes to health care policy.
There’s been “a lot of uncertainty” she said as investors grew more concerned about whether sales of obesity drugs could really meet the industry’s lofty expectations of a market larger than $100 billion in the coming decades. Novo Nordisk’s main competitor is the American drugmaker Eli Lilly, which also sells obesity drugs.
On Wednesday, Novo Nordisk said its revenue jumped 25 percent last year to 290 billion Danish kroner, or $40.6 billion, driven by growing sales in the United States, and reported profit of more than 100 billion Danish kroner.
It expects sales growth of 16 to 24 percent in 2025, less than the previous year, because of increasing competition and pricing pressures. But the company said it was still seeing strong demand for obesity treatments.
“The number of people living with obesity is very, very large, so this is a market we are just starting to serve,” Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the drugmaker’s chief executive, said on a call with reporters on Wednesday. The 2025 guidance assumes “a quite significant ramp” in sales in the United States, he added.
The company’s share price rose about 5 percent on Wednesday.
Novo Nordisk has been repeatedly thrust into the limelight in recent weeks by Mr. Trump and his new administration.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said he doesn’t like obesity drugs, is Mr. Trump’s nominee for health secretary, a post that would give him some power over access to the drugs. And last month, Mr. Trump threatened tariffs on Denmark, Novo Nordisk’s home country, in a spat over Greenland. Novo Nordisk manufacturers some of its drugs in the United States, but it still imports the active pharmaceutical ingredient, semaglutide, for some of its most popular injectable drugs.
Karsten Munk Knudsen, the company’s chief financial officer, said in an interview on Wednesday that the company had a lot of optimism for 2025. But “we are not naïve in terms of everything that’s happening around us,” he added. “Geopolitics is probably more volatile currently as compared to what it’s been in the past few years.”
In the past few weeks, the threats and imposition of tariffs have created a lot of uncertainty for business leaders around the globe. Although Mr. Trump postponed tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico this week, he proceeded with additional tariffs on Chinese goods and warned that tariffs on the European Union would “definitely happen.”
Novo Nordisk began this year recovering from the disappointing trial results of its next-generation weight loss drug CagriSema. After a late-stage trial slightly missed expectations, the company’s share price plunged 20 percent on a single day in late December. But Mr. Jorgensen said the company remained “confident in the biology of CagriSema.”
Novo Nordisk also said that it expected to file for the first regulatory approval of CagriSema in early 2026. Last month, results for an early-stage trial of a new drug, amycretin, performed well, pushing up the company’s shares.
