Coloplast Seeks to Restore Investor Trust With Firing of CEO
That's according to Lars Rasmussen, the Danish company's chairman, who is now stepping in to become interim CEO while a search for a replacement for Kristian Villumsen is underway. The shares fell as much as 7.4% in Copenhagen trading, the most in a year.
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Gizmodo
16 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
Ozempic Maker Novo Nordisk Freezes Hiring Amid Ongoing Struggles
No one stays on top forever. It's a lesson that Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk may be painfully learning about. The Danish pharmaceutical company has enacted a hiring freeze—the latest sign of a sinking financial outlook for the once-titan of the obesity treatment world. Reuters reported on the hiring freeze Wednesday. The company has faced numerous setbacks in recent months, including billions shaved off its stock market value and continued competition from cheaper, compounded versions of its blockbuster drug semaglutide. Though the freeze will apparently only apply to certain segments of the company, layoffs are likely not far off in the distance. 'We currently have a hiring freeze in non-business critical areas,' said Novo Nordisk in a statement to Reuters. Semaglutide is the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk's diabetes drug Ozempic and obesity medication Wegovy. It and similar compounds mimic the hormone GLP-1, which helps regulate insulin production and our appetite (among other functions). Though GLP-1 drugs have existed for two decades, semaglutide has proven more effective at helping people lose weight than diet and exercise alone, as well as other older medications. The approval of Wegovy in 2021 greatly reshaped the field of obesity medicine and earned plenty of money for Novo Nordisk. In 2024, the company reported about $42 billion dollars of revenue, driven by increasing sales of Wegovy and Ozempic (sometimes prescribed off-label for weight loss treatment). The company's success was so tremendous that it even helped bolster Denmark's local economy. But the company's meteoric rise has stumbled as of late for several reasons. For starters, it's no longer the only game in town, following the approval of Eli Lilly's tirzepatide for obesity (under the name Zepbound) in 2023. The drug, which combines GLP-1 with another weight-related hormone, is generally more effective than semaglutide, and people have steadily started to prefer it. Though Ozempic and Wegovy might still be more well known to the public, prescriptions of Zepbound in the U.S. now appear to be surpassing the former. Ozempic-Maker CEO Ousted Over Pharma Company's Rocky Market Downturn Novo Nordisk has also explicitly cited the emergence of the compounded drug market for GLP-1 therapy for its recent struggles. Compounded drugs are custom-made formulations of semaglutide and tirzepatide, often much cheaper, and produced by specialized pharmacies. The Food and Drug Administration has attempted to crack down on this industry, but many companies are still producing these drugs, and many people are still buying them. The fight over these compounded drugs has become so fierce that Novo Nordisk abruptly ended its newly formed partnership with telehealth company Hims in June. The company alleged that Hims was trying to deceptively market their compounded version of semaglutide over Wegovy to its users (Hims, for its part, has denied the accusation). These headwinds led Novo Nordisk to admit earlier this year that its projected sales growth in 2025 will fall short of past projections, which has since fueled further financial calamity. In May, the company fired its longtime CEO amid declining stocks. In July, investors wiped off $70 billion from the company's market value after it once again lowered its sales growth forecast for the remainder of the year. Sales of Wegovy and Ozempic do remain strong overall. And Novo Nordisk is developing other treatments intended to reclaim its throne in the obesity medicine field (including weight loss pills and drugs potentially more effective than any other treatment to date). But the company's fortunes are likely to worsen before they get better. Novo Nordisk Abruptly Ends Partnership with Hims, Claiming 'Sham Compounding' GLP-1 Drugs Departing CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen stated in early August that the company, which currently employs nearly 80,000 people, will probably experience layoffs. The company's new CEO, Maziar Mike Doustdar, is also considering layoffs, according to a recent report from Danish TV2. This new era of obesity treatment isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But whether Novo Nordisk will remain the big dog on top is much more in question today than it would have been even just a few months ago.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Opendoor (OPEN) Ends 'Meme Rally' on Profit-Taking, Shares Up 75% Month-to-Date
We recently published . Opendoor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:OPEN) is one of Wednesday's worst performers. Opendoor Technologies extended its losses to a second day on Wednesday, shedding 11.05 percent to close at $3.22 apiece as investors continued to sell off positions following what analysts deemed a 'meme rally' last week. In just the past 14 trading days of the month, Opendoor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:OPEN) has already seen a 75-percent surge in its share prices, enough to merit a profit-taking amid the lack of catalysts to sustain the rally. 20 Affordable, Promising Cities to Buy Real Estate in 2024 In recent news, Opendoor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:OPEN) announced the immediate resignation of CEO Carrie Wheeler, who took over the role in 2022 but failed to reassure investors of the ongoing turnaround efforts. She was temporarily replaced by chief technology officer Shrisha Radhakrishna while a permanent CEO has yet to be named. Meanwhile, Opendoor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:OPEN) recently regained compliance from the Nasdaq after it notified the company earlier this year of its failure to meet the $1 minimum bid price requirement to stay listed. The issue was resolved after Opendoor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:OPEN) announced on August 1 that it had successfully traded above the minimum level for 12 consecutive days from July 15 to 30. In the second quarter of the year, Opendoor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:OPEN) remained at a net loss of $29 million, albeit lower by 68 percent than the $92 million in the same quarter last year. While we acknowledge the potential of OPEN as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an extremely cheap AI stock that is also a major beneficiary of Trump tariffs and onshoring, see our free report on the . Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
How Modular Manufacturing Can Help Create Abundance
Scott Graybeal, CEO of Caelux, a solar energy innovator in perovskites to make solar energy more powerful and cost effective. We live in an age of incredible technological advancement, yet we face critical shortages and high costs in many essential areas. To solve the challenge, I believe we need to build more. A lot more. What do we need to build exactly? The simple and not overly glib answer: everything. We need more electricity and more renewable energy to power today's technologies and tomorrow's innovations. We need more resilient supply chains, more affordable healthcare options, more effective public transportation, more opportunities for advanced education and skills training, and more sustainable food production systems. Solving the problem of artificial scarcity is a policy issue, but it's also a manufacturing and production problem. In that respect, I believe modular intelligent manufacturing can help accelerate the pace of production while driving down costs and enhancing local economic benefits. Here's how: Issues With Current Manufacturing Methodologies Traditional, centralized manufacturing models, while powerful, can often create bottlenecks, inflate costs and limit accessibility. For example, building out a complete supply chain in the solar industry is currently a very expensive undertaking as producing key components such as polysilicon safely and cost-effectively requires large campuses and significant capital expenditures. In today's typical solar manufacturing supply chain model, the foundation is silicon, most of which is processed in China's Xinjiang Province. Quartzite is extracted and melted using readily available but dirty coal and converted to polysilicon. Similarly, contract manufacturing of electronic goods has often leveraged large campuses with massive dormitories housing potentially coerced workers who produce products that we use daily. This race to the bottom has driven a transition from West to East and increased wealth for the recipients, but at the expense of the ultimate consumer. While these examples are particular to my industry, the solar sector, they are emblematic of the bottlenecks, ethical quagmires and inherent vulnerabilities in existing manufacturing methodologies. How We Can Innovate For Abundance And Localized Production The days of mega-campuses and complex international supply chains should be on their way out. To unlock abundance, a transformation in supply chains and manufacturing is needed and enabled by recent innovations. The issue often cited by manufacturing executives is that centralized manufacturing models may be less efficient than we think. For instance, large campuses mean large human infrastructure, and AI agents have the potential to greatly simplify tasks that would normally require a large staff that are not directly adding value to the product. Likewise, the future of manufacturing engineering could also be streamlined, where a single engineer may command hundreds of agents processing experiments from data and evaluating thousands of parameters far more quickly than their human counterparts. With AI, process control moves from a strictly defined recipe to fluid feed-forward, feedback control that determines the ideal operating point given thousands of input parameters based on tens of millions of micro-experiments. As a result, innovation can be accelerated and products manufactured more quickly. In order for this to happen, we need to focus on exploring more readily available material systems that put the 'hard' in 'hardware' and source from multiple locations to ensure supply chain survivability alongside sustainability. These two are not mutually exclusive. Modular intelligent manufacturing is an approach where production processes are designed to be readily scaled in sections or 'modules.' These modules can be aligned with the amount of capital available, allowing companies to build out multiple production lines or nodes—often at a more affordable price point. Modular intelligent manufacturing also strives to package production in such a way that it can be deployed almost anywhere, so producers can leverage local job seekers to spread the economic benefits of manufacturing jobs across the widest possible part of the market. The implications for housing and solar power could be enormous. According to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research and educational organization, modular housing can speed up the time from permit to completion by two months compared to stick builds, while also making units more affordable. Similarly, modular intelligent manufacturing in the solar sector could enable localized, cost-effective production. This change can happen rapidly. In my experience, using automation and trained agents, production sites can be set up in days, not months. In closing, we need to build more, faster and more efficiently to address societal needs. Manufacturing abundance doesn't have to be an esoteric dream. We can bring it to fruition right now. Modular intelligent manufacturing can help, allowing us to build more, more efficiently and more cost-effectively. Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
