This week, 60 Minutes traveled to Denmark to report on Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company that’s behind the popular drugs Wegovy and Ozempic.
Novo Nordisk’s success with these drugs has led to huge profits: its current market capitalization is larger than Denmark’s entire GDP.
Novo Nordisk’s outsize profits have also led to a surge in tax revenue. Last year, the company paid $2.3 billion in income taxes to the Danish government.
“It’s hard to exaggerate the impact of Novo Nordisk and of Ozempic and Wegovy on the Danish economy,” correspondent Jon Wertheim told 60 Minutes Overtime.
Wertheim interviewed Mads Krogsgaard, the CEO of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The foundation, which controls 77% of the company’s voting shares, is responsible for distributing profits towards research into medicine and science.
Wertheim asked Krogsgaard how the company is dealing with its meteoric success and representing Denmark on the world stage.
“In some ways… we liaise more than we’ve done ever before with politicians [and] ministers,” he said.
“We hope there’ll [be] more companies like Novo Nordisk. But for the time being, it is the Novo Nordisk company that is driving a lot of, you can see, the wealth of the country.”
Within Denmark, Novo Nordisk has created thousands of new jobs, “which is a lot in a small country,” Krogsgaard said.
“The risk here is that this is one sector,” Wertheim told 60 Minutes Overtime. “There are dangers that come with having one sector be so dependent for so much growth.”
Nokia
In 1999, producer Michael Gavshon and correspondent Bob Simon reported from another Nordic country, Finland.
Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone company, was dominating the global market in cellphones.
At the time, 65% of Finns used cellphones, compared to just 25% of the population in the United States.
Simon asked then-CEO Jorna Ollila if he felt Nokia was the vanguard of a revolution.
“I think we have seen the first part of it. There’s more to come,” Ollila said.
At the height of its success, Nokia’s share of the Finnish GDP was 4%. It remained the undisputed mobile phone industry leader until the late 2000s.
Then, in 2007, Apple changed everything when it launched the iPhone, and the smartphone era began.
With almost instantly high demand, competitors like Google and Apple began to elbow Nokia out of the market with innovative smartphones.
In 2008, consumer demand for Apple’s iPhone was enormous. The first weekend the second iPhone was released, Apple sold 1 million units.
Nokia’s downfall, coupled with the European debt crisis, had major impacts on the Finnish economy.
Approximately 25,000 Finns left the company from 2008 to 2017. In 2012, Nokia’s contribution to Finland’s GDP was negative.
Risks for Novo Nordisk and Denmark
Today, Novo Nordisk accounts for nearly half of the country’s GDP growth, according to an analysis by Denmark’s Danske Bank.
Denmark’s economy could be facing a risk due to its dependence on one sector, and one company.
“It’s not quite as perilous as it might be elsewhere. But there are dangers that come with having one sector be so dependent for so much growth,” Wertheim said.
Wertheim spoke with Hanne Sindbaek, an independent Danish journalist who has written two books about the history of Novo Nordisk and its founders.
Wertheim asked what the impact on Novo Nordisk would be if drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic continued to get cheaper, and insurers in the United States started to subsidize the drugs for millions of Americans.
“Well, it’s going make it very, very rich,” she told Wertheim. “There might be competitors coming out of the woodwork here and there.”
“But they were the first, and they’re the biggest…they have got a very good chance of leadership in that field.”
There are, however, ethical concerns about the high price of the drugs, and some people who could benefit from them are currently unable to afford them.
“Novo Nordisk [will] have these concerns. And there’ll be discussions in Novo Nordisk about this,” she told Wertheim.
The video above was produced by Will Croxton and Brit McCandless Farmer. It was edited by Sarah Shafer Prediger.
