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Novo Nordisk makes medicines, most famously for diabetes and weight loss, and sells them around the world.
Novo Nordisk is a Danish drugmaker that has spent a century making medicines for diabetes, and in the last few years it became one of the most valuable companies in Europe because of a single class of drugs. Its big sellers are GLP-1 medicines — injections and pills that mimic a gut hormone to control blood sugar and curb appetite. The flagship brands are Ozempic and Rybelsus for type 2 diabetes, and Wegovy, the same molecule sold for weight loss. People inject or swallow these drugs, and the company makes money by selling them, mostly to insurers, governments, and pharmacy chains that fill prescriptions.
The business has two big engines. Diabetes care is the old, steady one: insulin and GLP-1 drugs sold in pens and vials. Obesity care is the new rocket: Wegovy turned a condition that doctors mostly treated with diet advice into a pharmaceutical market, and demand outran supply for a long stretch. Novo Nordisk also sells a smaller batch of rare-disease medicines, but they are a side dish. The company began in 1923 as a small Danish insulin producer, and it still controls a huge share of the global insulin market alongside Eli Lilly and Sanofi. Why do customers pick it? Scale and science. Novo Nordisk ran the big clinical trials that proved these drugs work, it owns the factories that fill the pens, and it has the sales force to reach doctors everywhere. Its main rival is Eli Lilly, whose own weight-loss drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, are gaining fast. Competition is the real risk: Lilly is winning share, cheap generic versions of older GLP-1 drugs are coming in some markets, and governments are pushing back on prices. The company has also hit manufacturing limits, which is why it spent billions building new plants.
Insulin was discovered in 1921, and it turned diabetes from a death sentence into a manageable disease. A Danish Nobel laureate, August Krogh, went to Canada to get permission to make it at home, and his wife Marie, who had diabetes, pushed scientist Hans Christian Hagedorn to join the effort. In March 1923 the first patients were treated with their insulin, and a company built on proteins was born.
Two former employees of that first company, brothers Harald and Thorvald Pedersen, decided they could do it better and started their own insulin firm, Novo. For more than six decades the two Danish firms fought over the same market, a rivalry that would shape both for a very long time.
After more than sixty years of fighting over insulin, the two rivals finally joined forces. Novo Industri was the surviving company and took the name Novo Nordisk. The feud was over, and the combined firm could now focus its energy outward.
Along the way, Novo had become very good at fermentation, the craft of growing things in big tanks, and that skill built a side business in enzymes for laundry detergent. In 2000 that business was spun off as its own company, Novozymes, leaving Novo Nordisk to focus purely on medicine.
By 2019 Novo was a diabetes specialist with sales that had gone flat. Under new CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, the company made a bold bet and launched semaglutide-based GLP-1 drugs for weight loss. The move into obesity beat every expectation and completely changed the company's growth story.
The weight-loss boom sent Novo's shares soaring, and for a moment it was the most valuable listed company in Europe. The CEO who made the obesity bet, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, was named the Financial Times Person of the Year. It looked like the top of the world.
Then a rival showed up with a better product. Eli Lilly's obesity drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, delivered greater weight loss, and Novo's earlier failure to build enough supply had left the door open. Lilly's value surged toward a trillion dollars as it took the lead in obesity drugs.
The fall was brutal. Novo had been worth almost 660 billion dollars, but over roughly two years it lost about 500 billion in market value and dropped out of Europe's top ten. Lilly's gains, its own supply missteps, and doubts about its next-generation drugs all weighed on the stock.
With performance and competition both worrying investors, CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen stepped down. Maziar Mike Doustdar, who had led international commercial operations, took over and promised tighter execution, a smaller cost base, and a renewed focus on diabetes and obesity first.
Novo Nordisk shortened its name to just Novo for everyday use, keeping the full legal name globally. The point was to be more recognizable in an obesity market that increasingly sells directly to consumers, where Lilly was the name to beat. It also marked a fresh start under CEO Mike Doustdar, along with a cultural reset called The Novo Way.
At its Capital Markets Day, Novo laid out a plan to launch more than five multi-blockbuster drugs by 2030, aiming for over 150 billion Danish kroner in sales from them by 2035 and growth in line with peers through 2030. The goal is to serve more than 60 million patients by 2030 and to stand on more than diabetes and obesity as semaglutide loses its exclusivity.
The cash machine is enormous. In 2024 the company brought in about 290 billion Danish kroner in sales, up roughly a third from the year before, and profits grew even faster. Novo Nordisk returns much of that to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks, and it plows the rest into factories and new drug trials, including pills for obesity and treatments for heart and liver disease. The wild ride of the last few years shows both the power and the fragility of a drug business: one molecule can change a company's size overnight, and one competitor can start changing it back.
Saved answer · last researched 20 Oct 2026