Dive Brief:

• Novo Nordisk on Wednesday raised its profit and sales outlook for the year after reporting better-than-expected revenue from its Wegovy obesity pill.
• Adjusted sales and operating profit will now grow as much as 2% at constant exchange rates, Novo Nordisk said. In May, the high end of the company’s forecast was a 4% drop; in August, it said sales and operating profit growth might be unchanged for the year.
• The Wegovy pill, launched in January, brought in 5.39 billion Danish kroner in the third quarter, or about $811 million. That surpassed the average consensus analyst estimate of 4.96 billion kroner, according to Jefferies. Overall company sales and profit also beat Wall Street forecasts.

Dive Insight:

The Wegovy pill represents a rare bright spot for Novo, which has lost about two-thirds of its value since June 2024. A few years ago, the Danish drugmaker couldn’t keep up with demand for its marquee Ozempic and Wegovy brands in the injectable GLP-1 market, and shortages opened the door to cheaper compounded versions of the medicines. Eli Lilly also continued to pile up data supporting its rival Mounjaro and Zepbound products.

Lilly last week smashed analyst expectations for its own third-quarter revenue and claimed it now has control of 63% of the U.S. market for drugs that modulate GLP-1 and other metabolic hormones called incretins. The Indianapolis-based company also has a strong pipeline; in recent days, it announced that a much-anticipated experimental drug called retatrutide bested Ozempic in a head-to-head trial.

Novo’s pipeline has offered more headaches. The company suffered a key setback in a heart disease study and a failure in a trial that compared its next-generation obesity shot CagriSema with Lilly’s Zepbound. Meanwhile, Novo lost a court battle to block Lilly ads that featured claims of obesity drug superiority. And it’s bracing for patent expirations on the main ingredient in both Ozempic and Wegovy several years before Lilly faces the same problem for Mounjaro and Zepbound.

But so far, Novo has held the edge in oral versions of the GLP-1 drugs. Lilly’s Foundayo, launched in April, hasn’t caught on as fast as the Wegovy pill. Sales of Foundayo reached $184 million in the third quarter, falling short of Wall Street estimates by $44 million.

Novo on Wednesday emphasized its long-term plans to launch more blockbusters and highlighted progress with the Wegovy pill, which it expects to be available in more than 20 markets by next year. The company’s shares jumped more than 6% in early trading Wednesday in the U.S., climbing above $42 apiece. In June 2024, the stock traded over $140.

Separately, Novo and its Chief Financial Officer Karsten Munk Knudsen have “mutually agreed that he will leave the company to pursue other opportunities,” the company said Wednesday. Knudsen will be succeeded by Luigi La Corte, who is currently CFO of Galderma.