The CEO of the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF), the philanthropic arm of the Danish Ozempic-making pharmaceutical giant, says Denmark is in a fundamentally different position in regard to the “Nokia risk,” which caused a significant economic downturn in Finland, thanks to its overreliance on one giant company.
Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, the boss of the foundation, spoke with Fortune in London about how his philanthropic organization is using the success of Novo Nordisk to spearhead social and scientific causes while batting away fears that its influence over the Danish economy is a bad thing.
Novo Nordisk has experienced a meteoric rise on the back of surging demand for its GLP-1 drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, and semaglutide, which have been shown to fight obesity. At a valuation of $373 billion, the pharmaceutical company is now Europe’s largest by market capitalization and was briefly worth more than the entire Danish economy.
The Novo Nordisk Foundation has become a major philanthropic force as a result, with Novo Holdings’ €149 billion ($156 billion) in assets under management dwarfing the $75.2 billion endowment of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Cautious analysts have flagged the “Nokia risk” as a potential danger from the Danish economy becoming too reliant on a single company, in this case, Novo Nordisk.
Finland’s economy built a reliance on Nokia at the turn of the century, with the company contributing 25% of Finland’s GDP growth between 1998 and 2007. However, Nokia’s business model collapsed with the proliferation of smartphones, leaving Finland’s economy in a yearslong economic mire.
There are parallels between Nokia and Novo Nordisk in their relation to their respective economies, at least in their rise. Denmark’s economy would have shrunk by 0.1% last year rather than growing by 1.8% without its pharmaceuticals sector.
Danske Bank expects Novo Nordisk to play a significant part in Denmark’s economy, which it forecast in March to grow by an estimated 2.4% this year. The company is also a huge taxpayer, sending $2.3 billion in income taxes to the Danish government in 2023.
It prompts the question of whether a shock or a gradual increase in competition could see Denmark go the same way as Finland.
However, the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Thomsen was dismissive of these comparisons.
Denmark’s ‘Nokia risk’
“You cannot compare Novo and Nokia from a dynamic perspective,” Thomsen told Fortune. “The Nokia risk is fundamentally different.”
“Because the Nokia, the one we all had, was an old-fashioned but wonderful, robust telephone. Then suddenly comes the first iPhone that’s totally changing the technology. Now, you could email, you could do things you never could before with smartphones. And that was a technology disrupter.”
Detractors, however, say Novo Nordisk faces a different risk, namely the expiry of its valuable patent on its weight-loss-aiding drugs, with the core patent for Ozempic expiring in 2026. After this point competitors will be able to access these patents to make their own GLP-1s, threatening the company’s chokehold on the industry.
“You will have Chinese, Russian, Brazilian, Indian companies producing stuff like semaglutide sooner rather than later, but they will [only] be able to fulfill some of the local demands, probably nationally speaking,” Thomsen admitted. However, he said that if you look at the history of the diabetes drug insulin, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly have continued to operate a duopoly event in the wake of patent expirations.
“The same is expectedly going to happen with GLP-1s,” said Thomsen. His main argument for this is scale.
Thomsen said that currently, only around 9 million people are making use of Novo Nordisk’s and Eli Lilly’s GLP-1s against an estimated 1 billion people living with obesity around the globe.
“So you can multiply it by effect to 10, 15, 20, 30, the amount of volumes of these molecules needed to take down the obesity burden, the diabetes burden.
“So I think what will happen is there’s going to be a massive scale-up, where the biggest contributor to that scale-up will be the existing companies, because they simply have the scale and the technology, while there will be a multitude of small regional players that will be making biosignals. And that’s all fine and good, and prices will come down, but that’s compensated by huge volumes.”
