Is Novo Nordisk a BUY?
Novo Nordisk. Equity Research! Part 3/3
To say that the last month has been quite eventful for Novo Nordisk feels like an understatement.
Oral Wegovy has a strong launch, sending the stock up 26%.
Novo releases a terribly weak 2026 guidance, the stock falls 15%.
Hims launches a compounded Wegovy copy, the stock falls further.
FDA recommends a criminal case against Hims.
Novo sues Hims, the stock jumps 14%.
This is 3rd Part of my 3-part Novo Nordisk Deep Dive.
In Part 1, I talked about how Ozempic transformed Novo Nordisk.
In Part 2, I looked at competition with Lilly and other risks.
In today’s report, I will look at Novo Nordisk’s opportunities, finances, and valuation. Furthermore, I will create a valuation model to try to determine whether Novo Nordisk is a Buy.
Moreover, I will give my brief opinion on the recent drama with Hims.
Let’s begin.
1. Hims GLP1 Pill
2. Opportunities
3. Financial Analysis
4. Valuation
5. Valuation Model
6. Conclusion
1. Hims GLP1 Pill
For those not familiar with the situation, Hims is a D2C healthcare platform, that dabbles in a type of drug manufacturing called compounding. Compounding is meant to be used in rare and special cases where a patient can’t take a commonly available drug dose or delivery mechanism because of a specific medical condition.
What Hims did, however, was use this loophole to manufacture and sell compounded GLP1 drugs at a massive scale, clearly breaking the spirit of the law. They were only getting away with it because of relaxed enforcement from the FDA and Novo’s resistance to filing a lawsuit.
However, what Hims did with the launch of the compounded oral Wegovy copy was so brazen and so illegal that Novo Nordisk immediately said they would sue them, and the notoriously slow FDA had to release a statement calling Hims out by name and recommending them to the DOJ to start a possible criminal investigation.
Furthermore, the way Hims responded to this lawsuit was so disgusting that I can’t believe that I was ever bullish on the company last year.
By specifically calling out Novo Nordisk as a “Danish company attacking millions of Americans,” Hims is playing into American nationalism and hoping that Trump and his supporters will step in to support them because of Trump’s current conflict with Denmark over Greenland, which is pathetic.
Pointing Novo Nordisk as the bad guy, whose medicines have literally saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people, while Hims is literally STEALING the science that Novo Nordisk spent decades and billions of dollars building, is pathetic.
Pretending that this is about “patient choice” instead of Hims attempting to circumvent regular FDA new drug approval processes is pathetic.
My prediction is that Hims is finished and Novo will win this lawsuit. But that won’t be even necessary because the FDA and the DOJ will take the Hims to the cleaners.