Sherwood News

What’s eating Novo Nordisk?

The Ozempic maker’s market cap has more than halved since this time last year.

7/30/25 9:26AM

Last July, Novo Nordisk, the drugmaker that brought us Ozempic and Wegovy, was sitting pretty as Europe’s most valuable company — and, with a margin of more than $200 billion between it and storied luxury house LVMH, it wasn’t even really close. A lot can change in a year.

Weighed down

Since peaking just shy of $660 billion last summer, Novo has been shedding market cap almost nonstop. Yesterday, shares ended up posting their steepest single-day drop in the Danish behemoth’s history, sliding 23% after the company slashed its sales and profit outlook for the year ahead. Now, Novo’s new CEO, a veteran insider who was announced with the slimmed-down outlook yesterday, will have his work cut out to stop the bleeding.

If 2024 was the year that GLP-1s “took over,” Ozempic (launched in the US in 2017) was very much leading the charge, having amassed enough cultural weight to serve as the poster child for the new wave of obesity treatments.

Since then, however, offerings from Eli Lilly, as well as stiff competition from compounders like Hims & Hers and Noom, have started to muscle in on Novo’s leading Ozempic and Wegovy drugs. Notably, Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound have proven to be more effective for weight loss with fewer side effects, according to reporting from the Financial Times.

Nouveau problems

Much is made of first-mover advantage in business, but Novo might just be the latest in a long list of cautionary tales — MySpace, BlackBerry, Yahoo Search, Zoom, Peloton — that proves being early isn’t always enough. With new GLP-1 effort CagriSema disappointing across trials in December and March, it’s not just Novo that’s feeling the pain; the company’s slumping sales are hurting Denmark’s national export figures, too.

Go Deeper: How the Novo Nordisk-Hims & Hers partnership epically flopped in just two months | Is Ozempic old news?

Luke Kawa

39m

Broadcom’s post-earnings romp continues on heavy volumes

As Broadcom enjoys a rush of new orders from a major new customer (reported to be OpenAI), it’s also reveling in a flood of traffic into the stock.

Volumes are running at 2.5 times their daily average through 1:20 p.m. ET as traders continue to bid up shares in response to the brighter outlook for 2026 revenues, which sent the stock up 9.4% on Friday.

The chip designer is basking in a flood of price target hikes from Wall Street, with Bank of America, JPMorgan, Argus Research, Citigroup, Bernstein, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Piper Sandler, Rosenblatt Securities, Wells Fargo, and Susquehanna upping their view on how high shares can go since the company reported earnings last week.

Separately, Taiwanese industry outlet DigiTimes is reporting that orders from several other leading tech companies for custom-made Broadcom chips (or ASICs) are “already in the pipeline.” This report has not been corroborated by our own or any other publication’s reporting to date.

Matt Phillips

SpaceX spectrum deal sends would-be rivals lower

Shares of struggling satellite services company EchoStar soared Monday, after the company — which had recently tottered close to bankruptcy — announced the sale of some of its wireless spectrum licenses to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX for $17 million.

The sale provides a competitive advantage to Musk’s growing Starlink satellite services business, as the licenses it is acquiring from Echostar allows Starlink to operate ground based broadband and cellphone services, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Entities that stood to be hurt by the emergence of a Musk-led SpaceX Starlink service got hit hard on the news. AST SpaceMobile, which has plans to offer a similar satellite-to-consumer cellular service, tumbled.

So did wireless tower providers like Crown Castle and American Tower. Low cost cellular service provider T-Mobile, which had a deal with SpaceX, also slumped, as Luke noted earlier, along with other large wireless telecommunication services providers.

The wireless telecommunications industry grouping within the S&P 500 was down more than 2.5% shortly after noon, making it the worst performing industry within the S&P 500 on Monday.

SpaceX strikes $17B deal to buy EchoStar's spectrum for Starlink's direct-to-phone service | TechCrunch

The wireless telecommunications industry grouping within the S&P 500 was down more than 2.5% shortly after noon, making it the worst performing industry within the S&P 500 on Monday.

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J. Edward Moreno

Hims rises, Novo dips after FDA releases “green list” of GLP-1 raw material suppliers

Hims & Hers rose and Novo Nordisk slipped in early trading after the US Food and Drug Administration released a "green list" of foreign GLP-1 ingredient suppliers that it considers in compliance with agency standards.

Some telehealth companies like Hims sell copycat versions of Novo's and Eli Lilly’s blockbuster weight-loss drugs through compounding pharmacies, which take the active ingredients from FDA-approved medications and make adjusted, or "personalized,” versions of the drug for patients.

Novo and Lilly have fought against this, arguing that it infringes on their intellectual property. They've sued smaller telehealth providers, pharmacies, and clinics in lieu of any action against them from the FDA. Instead, the FDA gave compounders a list of suppliers it deems safe.

Recent developments in the cases filed by the drugmakers so far as well as the FDA's recent actions suggest telehealth companies may be in a less risky position than investors previously thought. As of Monday morning, prediction markets pegged the likelihood of a suit from Novo against Hims at 34%, down from about 70% earlier this month.

Luke Kawa

Gold is outperforming the Nasdaq 100 since the launch of ChatGPT

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