Novo Nordisk conquered the world with its borderline miraculous drug semaglutide, sold as Ozempic and Wegovy. But with a sinking stock price and compelling alternatives eating its lunch, it’s now finding itself in a position in which it has to take desperate measures to fight off its competitors.
On Thursday, the Danish pharmaceutical giant vowed to take legal action against Hims & Hers after the telehealth company announced a much more affordable knockoff of its weight loss pill, Wegovy— which it’s offering starting at $49 for a month’s supply, though the price subsequently jumps to $99.
“The action by Hims & Hers is illegal mass compounding that poses a significant risk to patient safety,” Novo said in a statement, per CNBC. “Novo Nordisk will take legal and regulatory action to protect patients, our intellectual property and the integrity of the US gold-standard drug approval framework.
“This is another example of Hims & Hers’ historic behavior of duping the American public with knock-off GLP-1 products, and the FDA has previously warned them about their deceptive advertising of GLP-1 knock-offs.”
It remains to be seen if the lawsuit materializes. But Novo probably felt it had to say something to save face. Immediately after Hims announced its Wegovy knockoff on Thursday, the pharma giant’s shares plunged by nearly 8 percent.
Luckily for Novo, they’re now back up by over 5 percent, after its big brother came to the rescue: later that same day, the US Food and Drug Administration made its own vow that it would crack down on “illegal copycat drugs.” With the script now flipped, Hims’ stock nosedived by ten percent in after-hours trading, per Reuters, and as of today, is down by over 2 percent.
What Hims is offering is what’s known as a compounded form of a drug, which are made by pharmacies using their own ingredients, rather than being made by the pharmaceutical company. They’re different from generic versions of a drug, which are approved by the FDA. Compounded drugs are largely unregulated and receive no FDA approval, but are far cheaper than buying the brand name.
The practice of compounding drugs allows a pharmacist to tailor a drug to a patient’s specific needs, but big pharma companies view it as a loophole that lets copycats sell cheap knockoffs. At one point, Novo claimed that some one million Americans were taking semaglutide knockoffs, and appealed to the US government to ban imports of some of the key ingredients copycats used to formulate their versions of the drug.
The increased competition comes after a disastrous years-long spell for Novo, which was once the most valuable company in Europe. US rival drugmaker Eli Lilly overtook prescription for Wegovy with its Zepbound weight loss shot — which, to rub salt in the wound, also performed better in a head-to-head trial. It didn’t help that Novo’s offerings were prohibitively expensive before it eventually slashed them last summer, at one point costing more than $1,000 per month for customers without insurance. The perception of its weakening grip on the throne saw Novo’s stock collapse by over 50 percent year over year in 2025, wiping out hundreds of billions of dollars in value.
And its worst days may still be ahead. On Wednesday, Novo said it expected sales to fall this year, the New York Times reported, which would be its first annual decline in sales in nearly a decade. Meanwhile, Eli Lilly said it expected its sales to keep growing, nudging its market cap back above the $1 trillion mark.
Novo’s saving grace is that it beat Lilly to the punch with a pill version of Wegovy, released in January. Pill versions are seen as the next big steep for weight loss drugs, as they’re cheaper and less intimidating than shots. Its CEO Mike Doustdar claimed that the Wegovy pill is selling 15 times faster in its first month that than the injectable version on its debut, per the NYT. But this advantage may soon vanish too, as Lilly expects to release its own pill later this year.
More on weight loss drugs: People Who Go Off GLP-1s Are Experiencing a Sudden and Terrible Hunger