Americans are buying so much Ozempic that it’s shifting the economy of Denmark, where the drug’s maker Novo Nordisk is based.
Novo, Europe’s second most valuable listed company behind LVMH, is riding a wave of huge demand for its diabetes and weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, sending the company’s earnings to record highs.
Analysts expect Novo’s weight-loss drug sales to hit $6.1 billion this year, and to reach nearly $15 billion annually in 2027, according to polling from FactSet.
But now, Novo is exchanging US dollars from foreign sales for kroner in such an unusual quantity that it has boosted the Danish currency relative to the euro, bankers and economists told the Wall Street Journal.
‘Because the pharmaceutical industry’s exports have grown so much, it’s creating a big influx of currency into the Danish economy,’ Danske Bank director Jens Naervig Pedersen told the outlet.
Denmark works to keep its krone pegged to the euro at a fixed rate, and Danish policymakers have responded to the dollar influx by keeping their central bank rates lower than those of the European Central Bank.
Novo’s market capitalization of $418 billion is an order of magnitude larger than the next-largest Danish company, transport firm DSV, which is valued at $41 billion.
Novo’s valuation is even bigger than Denmark’s gross domestic product of $409 billion, although the two figures are not comparable — one is the total value of all Novo shares, and the other is the annual output of Denmark’s economy.
Novo manufactures its weight-loss drugs at two plants in Denmark, as well as a site in New Hampshire and at a sprawling complex in Clayton, North Carolina that employs 1,700.
However, experts warn there are risks inherent in having a single company dominate the economy of a small country.
The Journal pointed to telecom Nokia’s role in Finland, where the company accounted for 4 percent of GDP at its peak in 2000, but has since gone into decline.
