Investors got to hear Novo Nordisk’s side of the Metsera bidding war drama for the first time on Wednesday, as the company reported third-quarter earnings. A rough quarter underscored the stakes for the Danish pharma.
Novo Nordisk is fighting tooth and nail for Metsera, offering $10 billion to snatch the obesity biotech away from Pfizer. Analysts had a simple question for the company’s leadership on a third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday: Why?
One analyst—who prefaced his remarks with “don’t shoot the messenger”—asked if management had lost faith in Novo’s own internal obesity pipeline.
“I think we have a fantastic pipeline. But when you have an ambition to go to hundreds of millions of people and treat them, then no pipeline is broad enough,” Novo CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar responded.
The $10 billion offer follows Novo’s initial rival bid last week aimed at snatching the obesity biotech from Pfizer, which had offered $4.9 billion upfront in September. None too pleased, Pfizer has since taken the issue to court, alleging Novo is simply out to squash a potential competitor, not bring Metsera’s obesity candidates to market.
But Doustdar insisted that Metsera’s assets are differentiated from Novo’s and that adding them into the pharma’s pipeline would open up new patient groups as sales of Novo’s semaglutide franchise continue to lose ground to Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide drugs.
R&D and Chief Scientific Officer Martin Holst Lange followed, explaining that obesity is a broad disease with patients that have different needs and comorbidities, meaning a company like Novo needs to have a multi-pronged approach.
“For us to really serve the full palette of patients suffering from obesity and their comorbidities, we need a diversified pipeline,” Lange said. “What we’ve seen [in Metsera] is differentiation and complementarity.”
The answer did not satisfy analysts, several more of whom questioned whether Metsera is really differentiated. One analyst asked if Novo had undisclosed information that was backing the unprecedented and explosive public bidding war—echoing a similar query Pfizer received on its earnings call yesterday.
“We on more than one parameter see complementarity to our pipeline, and therefore this is an effective proposition for us,” Lange reiterated, without stating specifics.
Another key point that Novo leadership spoke to was the legality of the bid’s framework and the possibility that U.S. regulators may block it. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has reportedly been in touch with Novo regarding its rival bid, according to an analyst, but management did not speak specifically to that suggestion.
“If we did not feel that we would be able to close the deal, we would not have probably entered the transaction,” Doustdar told reporters on an earlier media call. Multiple executives said that outside legal experts were consulted prior to making the offer and Novo conducted thorough due diligence before making an offer.
As of Wednesday, the top bid remained Novo’s $10 billion, which includes post-closing contingent value rights. Pfizer, which reported earnings on Wednesday, characterized Novo’s intrusion as “an illegal attempt by a foreign company to do an end run around antitrust laws.”
Novo Nordisk sought to frame itself not as a foreign interloper trying to snatch Metsera away from an American company but as a Danish innovator trying to boost investment in the U.S.
“The offer highlights Novo Nordisk’s commitments to investing in the U.S. and interest in continuing to grow the scale of its U.S. investment,” said Ludovic Helfgott, EVP of product and portfolio strategy at Novo.
Doustdar, who was hosting his first earnings call for the Danish pharma after taking the position this summer, declined to say whether he would up his bid again.
‘Marathon, Not a Sprint’
The stakes for Novo and Doustdar are high. Novo reported a rough quarter, with missed metrics across the business. While Ozempic narrowly beat analyst expectations with 30.7 billion DKK ($4.7 billion) in sales, Wegovy missed by 3% at 20.4 billion DKK ($3.1 billion) and the total obesity care portfolio missed by 3%. Overall, Novo’s revenue of about 75 billion DKK ($11.5 billion) missed by 2% and diluted earnings per share of $4.50 missed by 8%.
Novo’s shares have declined 43% year to date, with an additional 2% decline in trading on Wednesday to 47.16. The shares closed the day prior at $48.25.
Doustdar, who was introduced as CEO on last quarter’s call, had a lot to answer for. Particularly, how will Novo will regain market share in obesity that is being lost to Eli Lilly, which raked in $10.1 billion for Mounjaro and Zepbound combined—surpassing Merck’s Keytruda as the best-selling drug of the quarter. Analysts and reporters also had questions about continued erosion from compounding pharmacies that are still producing copies of the semaglutide drugs.
“As a person who has grown up in the commercial part of the organization, you never like losing market share,” Doustdar said on the media call. “But it is really not about market share when you’re dealing with obesity at this point of time. It is about market access and expanding the market.”
Since taking the CEO chair, Doustdar has implemented what he called a number of difficult decisions, including laying off 9,000 staff, axing pipeline assets and cutting costs.
And 2026 isn’t expected to get much better. BMO Capital Markets noted Thursday morning that semaglutide is facing some international patent expiries, which will bring generic copies onto the market. The patent in Canada, in particular, was never filed, a mistake in Novo’s strategic planning for the asset.
Novo has also just reached a pricing agreement for semaglutide under the Inflation Reduction Act, which would have had “a low single-digit drag on global sales” if applied to 2025, according to BMO.
Novo has lowered expectations for the fourth quarter as well, narrowing guidance for 2025 to a range of 4% to 7% revenue growth, instead of 5% to 11%. For the whole year, operating profit is expected to be -2% to 1% and reported growth is expected to decline 11%.
CFO Karsten Munk Knudsen suggested that Novo could not sustain the explosive growth that occurred as the company established the obesity market with semaglutide.
“We’re seeing a deceleration of growth here in the third quarter compared to prior quarters. And that comes on the back of a couple of years of, I would say, hyper growth opening up the obesity market,” Knudsen told reporters.
Doustdar said Novo always expected semaglutide competitors and knew that maintaining 100% market share was not going to last. The CEO said that Novo’s strategy is to expand the market, not fight competitors to “share that part of the pie.”
“I would not have taken the job if I didn’t feel confident that we will be able to contain and sustain Novo’s leadership in diabetes and obesity,” Doustdar told reporters. “This is what we do. We do it well. It’s a marathon; it’s not a sprint.”
