We visited the city built by Ozempic. There is wealth, jobs and investment, but also doubts about the future

Kalundborg, the small Danish town where Novo Nordisk produces Ozempic and Wegovy, has become a symbol of the global weight-loss drug revolution. The pharmaceutical company’s growth has brought wealth, jobs and investment, but the recent stock drop, competition from Eli Lilly and layoffs raise questions about the city’s future

On a boat off Kalundborg harbor, Martin Høgh Sørensen steers while his wife, Karin, and friends Michael and Anne-Louise Eliasen pull and reel ropes to maneuver the sails.

Between the four of them they have accumulated almost 100 years of work for the local pharmaceutical company or its sister company — the first of which transformed life in this small Danish town.

Because a few years ago, Novo Nordisk struck gold: The company realized that the active ingredient in the diabetes drug Ozempic made patients lose substantial amounts of weight. Shortly afterwards, the Kalundborg factory began producing Wegovy, an approved weight-loss drug that uses the same active ingredient.

“A lot of people from Kalundborg used to commute to Copenhagen every day,” Sørensen, 69, tells CNN. “Now it’s the opposite.”

The worldwide outcry surrounding Novo’s “miracle drugs” catapulted the company into becoming, in 2023, . Danske Bank, the country’s largest bank, also credits the company with saving the Danish economy from a recession that year.

Sørensen works for Novo Nordisk Engineering, the company helping to expand the Kalundborg factory, part of Novo’s massive $9.3 billion investment in the area since 2021. He is, “of course, a little proud” of his city of fewer than 17,000 people, which now finds itself unexpectedly at the center of the global weight-loss revolution.

Still, revolutions are rarely easy. Novo’s share value has fallen by almost three-quarters since its peak in 2024 and the company has fallen into one of Europe’s most valuable companies. It also announced thousands of layoffs and expects sales and profits to fall by up to 12% throughout 2026.

So what happened? And what does this mean for the modern, growing city of Kalundborg?

The “curse” of whoever arrives first

Novo has gone “from having unparalleled capability… to now being quite exposed,” explained Michael Leuchten, senior European pharmaceutical research analyst at Jefferies, an investment firm.

The company is locked in a fierce rivalry with Eli Lilly, the U.S. pharmaceutical giant whose GLP-1 drugs — named for the appetite-suppressing hormone they mimic — surpassed its own in sales for the first time last year in the United States, according to Jefferies.

In its first-quarter results, Novo said strong sales of the injectable Wegovy outside the U.S. helped boost profits. But the company is bracing for a flood of cheaper generic versions of the drug as the patent protecting the active ingredient, semaglutide, expires this year in several countries, including India and China.

Executive director Mike Doustdar attributes Novo’s problems to the “curse of leadership.” As a pioneer in commercializing a popular and effective drug to treat obesity, competitors were able to learn from the company’s mistakes, she told CNN.

“We were the ones who paved the way for everyone else,” said Doustdar. A serious early error, he noted, was not increasing the doses in some of the injectable pens to maximize the resulting weight loss.

Leuchten sees the situation differently, arguing that Novo was stuck relying too much on semaglutide instead of diversifying the set of active ingredients in weight-loss drugs. This would make the company less vulnerable to competition as the patent expires in various markets.

“What I disagree with is saying that because Novo made mistakes, others found it easier,” Leuchten told CNN. “Novo failed and did not learn from its mistakes and was very slow to change course.”

This year, Novo launched Wegovy pens with higher doses and, crucially, launched an oral tablet version in the US with great success (tablets are less intimidating for many than injections). In its first-quarter results, Novo said prescriptions for the pill — produced at the company’s North Carolina facility — have now surpassed 2 million. According to a report from Morgan Stanley last month, there are signs that the pill is already expanding the market – that is, customers are not just people who swapped pens for pills, but also new users of GLP-1.

Las Olsen, chief economist at Danske Bank, told CNN that Novo has undergone a change in mentality to compete in the United States, its largest market. In Denmark, “it never had this profile of a large commercial company”.

In February, Novo aired its first Super Bowl ad. Under pressure from the Trump administration, it agreed to cut drugs for Americans who pay out of pocket and make Wegovy available at reduced prices to Medicare — opening up millions of potential patients enrolled in the government’s health program for seniors. But lower prices also weighed on Novo’s profits in its most important market.

And Eli Lilly — which launched its own GLP-1 pill last month — remains the more than $900 billion thorn in Novo’s side.

The gold rush

In Kalundborg, Shaun Gamble, owner of Café Costa Kalundborg, felt the changing atmosphere in the city after Novo announced in September.

“I also knew some people who were fired… it was quite dramatic,” he told CNN at Café Costa Kalundborg, overlooking the harbor. “But now, with some more time passed, I think that feeling has settled.”

Of the 9,000 jobs that Novo said it would eliminate worldwide, 5,000 were distributed across units in Denmark. Novo did not specify how many occurred in Kalundborg.

Gamble hopes the layoffs were a “temporary issue” as Novo continues to expand the factory in a city accustomed to the industry’s ups and downs. In the 1960s, the city was producing Carmen Curlers — heated hair rollers popular around the world — before the arrival of the electric curler contributed to the collapse of the industry.

Novo does not take this risk.

Still a 200 billion dollar giant, the company’s growth has triggered an influx of people into Kalundborg in recent years, increasing demand for housing and property prices. Around 10,000 people work at the factory, either as employees or contractors, although many commute daily from outside the city.

A number of local businesses, from construction to electrical services, have benefited from the proximity. Still, they have sometimes had difficulties hiring enough staff, as many prefer to work at Novo, according to Martin Damm, mayor of Kalundborg municipality.

“I think we would have a poor life without Novo Nordisk,” Damm told CNN.

Despite Novo’s setbacks, Kalundborg continues to build for the future. Damm said more than 1,000 homes are currently under construction, as well as a highway that will connect the city to Copenhagen, about 100 kilometers to the east. Shop assistants and hairdressers tell her they speak English more often as the clientele becomes more international.

Back on Sørensen’s boat, under a fading spring sun, the longtime Kalundborg resident believes Novo’s dominance has made at least one aspect of daily life more difficult. According to him, the company absorbed many local mechanics.

“It makes it difficult to fix the car,” he said.