With sales of the oral GLP-1 medicine rising quickly, executives reassured investors that Novo has secured production capacity to support continued growth.
Novo has vowed to expand its oral Wegovy manufacturing capacity to serve 10 times more patients by the end of the decade.
Speaking at the company’s Capital Markets Day on Monday, Novo CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar said about 1.5 million people are currently on the Wegovy pill. Sales of the oral GLP-1 receptor agonist have risen quickly since Novo launched the product in January, outpacing the growth of Eli Lilly’s rival oral drug, Foundayo, that was launched a few months later. Doustdar allayed concerns that the amount of peptide in oral Wegovy will start throttling growth.
“We will scale our oral manufacturing to 10 times more than the patients we serve today, so you don’t have to worry anymore about, ‘Can they actually drive this through with their orals?’” Doustdar said. Across all Novo’s products, the CEO continued, “we will go from 46.5 million patients we serve today to more than 60 million if our calculation holds.”
Novo has secured capacity for the 10-fold expansion both in the U.S. and overseas. Speaking alongside Doustdar at the Capital Markets Day, Kasper Bødker Mejlvang, EVP, global manufacturing and supply at Novo,
cited investment in an ex-Alkermes plant in Ireland and scale-up of a facility in Durham, North Carolina, as actions supporting the goal. He noted that Novo supplies the U.S. market for oral Wegovy with five domestic production sites,
Third-party manufacturing plants could accelerate scale-up if needed, Mejlvang said. Novo is “exploring and developing further partnerships externally that will give us the flexibility to scale rapidly depending on how demand is evolving over the coming couple of years.”
The expanding manufacturing footprint will support Novo’s continued global rollout of the Wegovy pill. Novo has launched the product in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, markets that account for about one-third of the international opportunity, Emil Kongshøj Larsen, EVP, international operations at Novo, said at the Capital Markets Day.
Mexico is next on Novo’s launch roadmap. Novo plans to launch in more than 20 markets by the end of next year, covering two-thirds of the market.
“We do have plans . . . to reach two-thirds of our potential going forward. And that’s basically because our global manufacturing colleagues these days keep bringing good news in terms of how we crank up volumes in product supply,” Larsen said.
The company’s goal for 2028 and beyond is to serve most of the obesity market.
Novo will keep its margins “broadly stable” while expanding output, Doustdar said. Prior manufacturing investments are starting to protect margins in the back half of the 2020s, BMO Capital Markets analysts said in a Sept. 21 note to investors. Novo invested significant sums in manufacturing in the past few years and now expects capital expenditure as a percentage of sales to fall, the analysts said.
