Shares of Novo Nordisk, the Danish drugmaker behind the popular diabetes and weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, plummeted more than 20 percent on Tuesday after it said its sales this year would grow much less than previously expected.
The drugmaker, which cited increased competition in the United States as a reason for its slower growth, said its sales would increase 8 to 14 percent this year, while operating profit growth is expected to be between 10 and 16 percent. At one point, the company had expected sales growth of 16 to 24 percent for 2025.
The share price dropped to its lowest level in more than three years.
The company also announced on Tuesday its new chief executive, Maziar Mike Doustdar, who is the current executive vice president for international operations. He will take over on Aug. 7.
“I don’t like it,” Mr. Doustdar said of the company’s share price drop on a call with reporters. “I don’t like it as an employee. I don’t like it as a C.E.O.-elect and I certainly don’t like it as a shareholder myself.”
The announcement “reinforces even more the urgency to act on the mandate I’ve been given,” he said.
Novo Nordisk has experienced a sharp reversal in fortunes over the past year. It lost its title as Europe’s most valuable company, first to the luxury empire LVMH and then to SAP, a German software company. In May, the board pushed out the company’s chief executive, Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, amid the steep decline in its stock price and shareholders’ concerns that Novo Nordisk would lose its place as a front-runner in a highly competitive market.
On top of this, some disappointing clinical trial results and investors’ losing faith in the lofty expectations of the weight-loss drug industry have hit Novo Nordisk especially hard.
The company has said most of its issues are in the United States, where it generates more than half of its sales. There, the company is facing stiff competition from other obesity medications, known as GLP-1 drugs, particularly the Eli Lilly drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound, as well as cheaper copycat versions.
This year, the Food and Drug Administration banned the sale of the cheaper products made from a process of mixing drug ingredients called compounding. Mr. Jorgensen said the company’s previous guidance had assumed that Novo Nordisk would be able to regain some of its lost market share after the ban on compounding weight-loss drugs. But that has not happened yet, he said, and there are more than one million patients using compounded GLP-1 drugs.
Novo Nordisk said on Tuesday that sales in the first six months of the year had increased 18 percent and operating profit had risen 29 percent, but that growth would slow in the second half.