$50 Billion in Sales Make Ozempic and Wegovy Prices Tougher to Justify
Bloomberg analysis suggests that high prices for popular shots aren’t necessary to offset research spending.
Ozempic and Wegovy are making so much money for Novo Nordisk A/S that their cumulative sales will soon surpass the drugmaker’s entire research budget for the past three decades, undercutting a key argument for their unusually high prices.
The pair of medicines for diabetes and obesity have sold nearly $50 billion as of the second quarter and are on track to make $65 billion by the end of this year, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of regulatory filings and analyst estimates. After adjusting for inflation, that would eclipse the $68 billion that Novo will have spent on all research and development since the mid-1990s, when the company started ramping up work on this class of drugs.