Published : 4 weeks ago, on 06/11/2024

LONDON (Reuters) – Novo Nordisk reported forecast-beating quarterly sales of its popular Wegovy weight-loss drug on Wednesday, sending its shares up nearly 9%.

Below are highlights of comments by CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen in an interview with Reuters:

CONFIRMS THE COMPANY HAS LIFTED US CURBS ON LOWER DOSES OF WEGOVY IN PLACE SINCE MID-2023:

“In our guidance for the full year, you can assume that there is a step up in the fourth quarter and that’s partly driven by increased products including Wegovy into the U.S..

“You can find different periods of times where you can say it’s plateauing but it’s not because of plateaued demand, it’s simply because of the supply into the market.”

ON WEGOVY PRICING IN THE UNITED STATES:

“Overall pricing in Q3 and Q2 is similar, and we see a stable pricing environment where you enhance rebates year on year to stay in the formulary.

“In this particular year,… we have a competitor launching a product (and) enhancing rebates to align mid-prices on our product… But that’s a one-time change, so relative stability between the quarters.”

ON WEGOVY SUPPLIES:

“There’s a one-to-one relationship between script data and supply and we believe that with more supply into the U.S. market that is going to lift the performance in the U.S.

“You will see that we will gradually be increasing the volume produced in the future like we’ve done in the past… We have tripled volumes over the last three years.”

“We still have a situation where there are far more patients who would like to have the treatment than what both Lilly and we can supply.”

WEGOVY SALES OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES:

“It’s clear that the international… sales of Wegovy were significantly ahead of consensus because we are now launching in more markets outside of the U.S.

“The key thing is that we will keep launching in more and more international… markets and volumes will go in that direction, but we’ll also see more volumes going into the U.S. market because we see an intact demand there and we’re far from saturating that demand.”

ON COMPOUNDING:

I’m really puzzled that in a market like the U.S. which is a trusted regulated market that you can actually inject yourself with a liquid product that is not regulated or approved or inspected.

“It beats me to be honest when I consider all the surveillance that we have our own production and also FDA has on our operations.”

“I think today it’s going via the internet, health spas, and stuff like that. It’s not in the formal supply chain where we sell our products. I think it’s a separate channel, and I’m quite alarmed by the prospect of the harm it can do to patients.

“The safety reporting is not done to the FDA but to states, so states are monitoring this. I don’t think we have seen the real safety data yet. It’s quite alarming, to be honest. It’s not something that’s impacting our business as of today.”

(Reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen in Copenhagen and Maggie Fick in London; Compiled by Josephine Mason; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)