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By Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen and Maggie Fick
COPENHAGEN/LONDON (Reuters) -Drugmaker Novo Nordisk expects Wegovy weight-loss drug sales in the United States to start to recover once a ban on compound copycats is enforced this month, its CEO said on Wednesday after the company cut its 2025 forecasts.
U.S. pharmacies that have been allowed to produce compounded copies of Wegovy and Ozempic due to a shortage of supply have been given until May 22 to stop, following a review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Compounders copy brand-name medicines by combining, mixing or altering drug ingredients.
Booming sales of Wegovy helped to make Novo the most valuable listed company in Europe, worth $615 billion at its peak, but its market value has halved to about $310 billion since peaking in June last year.
Prescriptions in the United States, its biggest market, have not grown since February despite Novo having increased supplies.
"Growth is expected to pick up in the second-half of the year," CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen said on a call with journalists.
Investors have been concerned that Novo's first-to-market drug is losing its lead to Eli Lilly, whose U.S. prescriptions for its Zepbound obesity shot have surpassed Wegovy since mid-March.
Novo Nordisk said first-quarter sales of Wegovy were 17.36 billion Danish crowns ($2.64 billion), declining 13% from the previous quarter, and below the 18.7 billion crowns expected by analysts.
"Over the summer, it's going to be put up or shut up for Wegovy," Barclays' analyst Emily Field said on CNBC. "Either prescriptions come back, or people are going to assume that Eli Lilly is going to take this whole market."
On a call with analysts, Novo executives said the company had a strategy for winning the market share currently held by compounding pharmacies.
Novo's shares were 3.4% higher at 1300 GMT.
Novo estimates that around one-third of the U.S. obesity drug market has been "captured" by compounding pharmacies, CEO Jorgensen said.
He said this had "dampened" the company's growth in the key U.S. market. "It's unprecedented in our industry to have very large volumes of products flowing to patients that are not approved," he said. "We were really surprised about that."
Jorgensen also said sales would benefit from a decision by the largest pharmacy benefit management unit in the U.S., CVS Health, to drop Zepbound from some lists of medicines it covers for reimbursement.
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