With sales of Novo Nordisk’s obesity blockbuster Wegovy more than doubling in 2024’s fourth quarter, the Danish drugmaker feels confident that it can maintain its edge over chief rival Eli Lilly in the year to come.
Still, Novo said Wednesday that it expects its successes in 2025 to be a bit milder compared to the heights of the prior year.
For the final three months of 2024, Novo delivered sales of 85.68 billion Danish kroner (around $12 billion), a 30% increase from the same period in 2023. That haul helped Novo’s total sales for 2024 grow 26% at constant currencies to 290.4 billion kroner (nearly $41 billion), contributing to operating profits of 128.3 billion kroner ($18 billion) for the year, Novo said in a Wednesday press release.
While Novo’s type 2 diabetes GLP-1 Ozempic has largely stolen the show in recent years, obesity med Wegovy—which utilizes the same molecule semaglutide at higher doses than Ozempic—accelerated rapidly in 2024’s fourth quarter, more than doubling sales to 19.9 billion kroner (roughly $2.8 billion) versus 9.6 billion kroner in 2023.
Even still, expectations for the obesity market are immense, with analysts at Intron Health noting that Wegovy growth missed Wall Street expectations for the quarter by about 2%.
For all of 2024, global Wegovy sales clocked in at 58.2 billion kroner (around $8 billion), compared to 31.3 billion kroner the prior year, Novo said in its annual report released Wednesday. Comparatively, Ozempic brought home around 120 billion kroner (nearly $17 billion) over the same stretch.
Novo’s total insulin sales totaled 55.37 billion kroner ($7.7 billion) versus 48 billion kroner in 2023.
Novo executives were keen to speak on Wegovy’s growing success during the company’s earnings call Wednesday, with David Moore, the drugmaker’s head of U.S. operations and global business development, noting that the GLP-1 med has reached about 200,000 weekly prescriptions in the United States. At the start of 2024, the number was roughly half that, he said.
More broadly, Novo has nearly tripled its global GLP-1 patient reach in the past three years and currently holds about two-thirds of the total GLP-1 market for patients with diabetes and obesity, Camilla Sylvest, Novo’s EVP of commercial strategy and corporate affairs, said on the call.
“The total market for anti-obesity medicines grew in the U.S. last year by 160%, and so the story continues to be about market expansion for obesity and for our own brand,” Moore added during Novo’s earnings presentation.
“Driving new prescriptions is, of course, our focus, and what we can say about that is we are shipping more of the starter doses as we speak,” he added.
Manufacturing outlays
The success of both Wegovy and Ozempic is due in no small part to the manufacturing expansion campaign Novo has been carrying out in recent years. The drugs’ impressive weight loss potential previously led to supply constraints for both products, though Novo appears to have largely rounded the corner on that issue.
Nevertheless, the Danish pharma continues to recognize the importance of its production network, with the company noting in its annual report that it plans to spend around 65 billion kroner ($9 billion) in 2025 to create additional capacity “across the supply chain.” Last year, Novo said it planned to spend some 45 billion kroner ($6.2 billion) on similar projects.
Meanwhile, thanks to the completion of Novo Holdings’ $16.5 billion Catalent acquisition in December, Novo Nordisk has purchased three of the CDMO’s production sites, bringing its total number of U.S. fill-finish facilities up to 14, Novo’s Sylvest said on the call.
“We still expect the three sites to gradually increase market supply beyond our pre-existing [contract manufacturing organization] contracts to the market from ’26 and allow us to reach significantly more patients in the years to come,” she said.
As for how Novo’s expansion efforts stack up against chief metabolic rival Lilly—which has also been on a multibillion-dollar incretin medicine expansion drive—"we have expanded patient reach … more than any other competitor in this market,” Novo’s finance chief, Karsten Munk Knudsen, said Wednesday, citing data from life sciences analytics firm IQVIA.
Novo expects to continue to grow its reach in 2025, though perhaps not at the magnitude witnessed in 2024. For the full year to come, Novo Nordisk is eyeing sales growth at constant currencies between 16% and 24%—a range that analysts at ODDO BHF called “wide but reassuring.”
Reflecting on Novo’s broad guidance for 2025, Knudsen said the scope of the revenue prediction reflects the “rapid growth rate” Novo’s business has enjoyed in recent years. He flagged three main factors that have the potential to affect performance for the year, both positively and negatively—those being supply, “magnitude of competition” and net pricing levels.