Weight-Loss Giants Have Investors Back on Their Side

It can be hard to sate investors’ appetites, but if there’s two companies who should know how to do it, it’s these two.

Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the two pharmaceutical companies behind the most popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs on the market, reported results this week. Last year, even skyrocketing sales didn’t satisfy investors, but the companies have kick-started 2025 with some zip in their Zepbound — and about time, too, because sales can’t keep ballooning forever.

Years of Plenty

Novo Nordisk reported its fourth-quarter financial results on Wednesday, revealing a 56% increase in net sales of obesity treatments such as its blockbuster drug Wegovy (the officially-for-weight-loss cousin of Ozempic, which has the same basic ingredients but is a diabetes treatment). On top of rising sales, Novo also inked a 21% increase in net profit. 

Eli Lilly’s results, published Thursday, were something of a mixed bag:

• The company’s earnings beat Wall Street estimates, but sales of its blockbuster drugs Mounjaro (for diabetes) and Zepbound (for obesity) came in ever-so-slightly under expectations.
• Eli Lilly managed to whet investors’ appetites by announcing that it would release data from a late-stage trial on its next big weight-loss drug, called retatrutide, later this year, which is earlier than expected. That won’t guarantee shareholder satisfaction long-term, however; late-stage trial data from Novo Nordisk’s next-generation drug CagriSema dinged the company’s market value by $125 billion in December.

A Spoonful of GLP-1: The next holy grail for weight-loss pharma companies is who can bring an oral pill to market, rather than having to sell weight-loss in needle form. Novo Nordisk’s CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen told CNBC on Wednesday the company thinks it’s going to beat Eli Lilly to the punch. “We actually think we can compete in the US market with tablet-based treatment before Lilly can launch,” Jørgensen said. If true, that’s a bitter pill for Eli Lilly.