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It was really only a matter of time before the Chinese also got access to Novo Nordisk’s weight loss product Wegovy.
At the end of June, the Chinese authorities approved the drug, and now the Danish pharmaceutical giant has launched it in China. The Chinese business media Yican reports that the first Chinese patient will receive a prescription in Shanghai this week. According to Reuters, the information is confirmed by Novo Nordisk.
The requirement to get Wegovy on prescription in China is that you have a BMI of at least 30 and suffer from at least one weight-related comorbidity. But many Chinese can already live up to that, says Søren Løntoft Hansen, who is a senior analyst at Sydbank with a particular focus on the pharmaceutical industry.
“Today there are 184 million severely obese Chinese, and it is expected that the number will grow to 500 million in 2045. So the potential is huge,” says the analyst.
Patent expires soon
Even if the Wegovy patent expires in a few years in China and Chinese manufacturers are already on the way with copycat products, it doesn’t have to have a big impact on Novo’s sales in China.
“It requires a huge investment to produce medicine on the scale that Novo Nordisk does. Any copy producers will also have to bring that investment back home, and that puts a limit on how low you can go in terms of price. At the same time, Novo already has a good name and a good network in China within diabetes treatment, which you can take advantage of,” says Søren Løntoft Hansen.
He expects that Novo Nordisk will initially only offer Wegovy to those patients who are willing to pay for it without having health insurance behind them.
“It is an approach that has been seen in other countries, and which helps to ensure that, in the future, you also have enough medicine available for those who have started the treatment. And then they will probably try to get Wegovy covered by one or more subsidy schemes as they also expand their production capacity to be able to offer it to even more patients,’ he says.
Novo announced in March that it would invest more than $500 million in its existing factory in Tianjin, China, to expand capacity.
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Source: politiken.dk
