Maziar Mike Doustdar, who was named as Novo Nordisk’s new CEO last week, spoke on a second quarter earnings call of reallocating resources to the company’s “main core” of metabolic disease.
As the new CEO of Novo Nordisk, Maziar Mike Doustdar plans to lean into what the company knows best—obesity and diabetes—as he tries to steer the Danish pharma back into the leadership position in the incretin market.
“We’re going to focus more on diabetes and obesity as this is our main core and has always been,” said Doustdar, who was named as the new chief executive last week more than a month after the departure of Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen was announced. Doustdar previously served as Novo’s executive vice president of internal operations; he starts his tenure as CEO on Thursday.
“I think I’ve been put into this position because I execute good and I out compete my competition,” he told investors during the pharma’s second quarter earnings call on Wednesday, adding that he plans to continue this aggressive attitude in his new role as leader and infuse it across the rest of the company. “Execution, execution, execution,” he said.
To power his drive for execution, Doustdar is also looking to move Novo’s resources around and funnel them into areas that matter the most. “We need to reallocate and look at our cost base and really put the money where the growth is,” he told investors, noting that such financial adjustments are important to “not fall behind the competition.” It was not clear on the call what specific reallocation strategies he plans to implement.
In a Q2 earnings news release on Wednesday, Novo revealed the discontinuation of a handful of investigational assets, the most notable of which is zalfermin, a long-acting FGF21 analog that was being developed for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH).
“We did not see, from an efficacy perspective, a dramatic improvement, neither in monotherapy nor in combination [with semaglutide] above and beyond what we already know semaglutide can do,” Martin Holst Lange, executive vice president of development at Novo, said on the call. “We do not progress assets that are not differentiated in a meaningful way.”
Novo also axed an antisense oligonucleotide that had failed a mid-stage study in acute myocardial infarction and the oral CB1 receptor blocker INV-347, which was in Phase I development for obesity. The pharma will also no longer work on ANGPTL3i, a monoclonal antibody for dyslipidemia.
Novo’s Q2 performance was largely in line with analyst expectations. Revenues jumped 18% year-on-year to hit 76.9 billion Danish krone ($11.95 billion). The blockbuster GLP-1 injection Ozempic, indicated for type 2 diabetes, was the pharma’s best-selling asset at 31.8 billion Danish krone ($4.94 billion), representing 15% growth from the same period last year, and falling behind the consensus estimate by 1%.
Wegovy, which uses the same active ingredient as Ozempic but is approved for chronic weight management, beat forecasts by 1% to earn 19.5 billion Danish krone ($3 billion) in the second quarter, a 67% year-on-year increase.
Alongside the announcement of Doustdar’s appointment last week, Novo also lowered its full-year 2025 outlook. The company now expects sales growth to be from 8% to 14% at constant exchange rates, down from the previous forecast of 13% to 21%. Operating profit is now expected to grow from 10% to 16%, below prior guidance of 16% to 24%.
“We don’t [take] our guidance reduction lightly,” outgoing CEO Jørgensen told investors on the call. “We treat it with utmost seriousness.” He added that he believes Doustdar will provide the “execution power needed” to deliver on the company’s aspirations for growth in the coming years. Jørgensen’s last day at Novo is Wednesday.
