Nytimes dealbook newsletter9/22/2023 ![]() Employers added 187,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department reported Friday, and unemployment rose to 3.8 percent as the economy continued to lose momentum built up after pandemic lockdowns.Ĭommerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visits China. labor market begins to look like its old self. In June, the company launched an obesity prevention unit near Copenhagen, to research how to stop the disease before people need to take drugs to lose weight. “We need to be looking at what’s the next thing,” its executive vice president for commercial strategy Camilla Sylvest, told me. (The drugs come with a long list of side effects.) “Even if you can reduce weight across the population with drugs, it’s not going to eliminate the risks of a poor diet.”įlush with cash, Novo agrees. “These drugs are game changers, but with an asterisk,” said David Ludwig, an obesity specialist and pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. Still, there is room for other approaches to fighting obesity. “If you’re eating fast food every day, you’ll probably continue to eat fast food every day,” James van Geelen of Citrinas Capital Management said on Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” podcast. And some analysts believe the drugs could disrupt the American diet. Medtronic’s chief executive, Geoff Martha, said the company had seen a “modest” dip in bariatric surgery, presumably as people opted for weight loss drugs instead. Walmart’s chief executive, Doug McMillon, told analysts in August that its executives “expect consumables, and health and wellness, primarily due to the popularity of some GLP-1 drugs, to grow as a percent of total.” Retailers like Walmart, Kroger and Rite Aid say GLP-1 prescriptions are bringing more people into stores, where they make other purchases. “We’re operating in kind of unusual territory.” “The market potential is very, very significant,” Novo’s chief financial officer, Karsten Knudsen, told me when I visited the company in June. There are signs they could treat addiction and even Alzheimer’s, too. But Novo says GLP-1 drugs could eventually have other uses, like helping prevent cardiovascular disease among obese adults. The market for weight loss drugs is huge: There are roughly 750 million obese people worldwide, including about 42 percent of adults in the United States, where obesity-related illnesses incur billions of dollars in health care costs each year. Eli Lilly’s sales surged 28 percent in the second quarter, thanks to another diabetes drug, Mounjaro, which the Food and Drug Administration may approve for weight loss this year.Īnd the full potential isn’t even clear yet. Together, they helped send Novo’s earnings rocketing up 32 percent in the first half of this year, and Novo’s market value is now larger than the entire Danish economy. They mimic a glucagon-like peptide that regulates appetite in the brain, leaving people feeling sated for hours. Novo Nordisk makes both Ozempic, which has been approved only for Type 2 diabetes, and its close relative Wegovy, which has been approved for weight loss. Known as GLP-1 drugs, the medications are already driving big profits. ![]() In theory, that opportunity - both for making profits and for losing fortunes - could be vast not only for the companies behind these drugs but also for some in completely different industries. ![]() “And when we see an opportunity to capitalize on it, we will.” ![]() “We will continue to study this,” Michael Johnson, the chief executive of the nutritional supplement maker Herbalife, told investors. ![]() Chard, the chief executive of Medifast, which makes diet products like shakes and protein bars, adding: “They’re looking for guidance.” He told analysts this even while explaining that new-generation drugs had helped pummel earnings, down 34.7 percent year on year. “It puts us in a good position to be a solution for those who are on the drugs,” said Dan R. On several earnings calls in August, chief executives reassured investors that the Ozempic revolution had not left them in the dust, and that they could somehow share in the blazing success of new diabetes and weight loss drugs. As they do every summer, publicly traded companies posted their second-quarter results while Americans were baring their bodies on the beach. ![]()
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