Who Makes Ozempic? Novo Nordisk Explained

If you have picked up an Ozempic or Wegovy pen and looked at the label, you have seen a small logo of a bull with a sun disk between its horns and a company name that most Americans had never heard of five years ago.

Ozempic is made by Novo Nordisk A/S, a Danish pharmaceutical company with headquarters in Bagsvaerd, a suburb of Copenhagen [1]. The same company makes Wegovy, the Wegovy pill, the Ozempic pill and a long list of insulins. Its US business runs out of Plainsboro, New Jersey, and its biggest American factory complex sits in Clayton, North Carolina [7].

One naming note, because it is brand new: on September 14, 2026 the company said it would start calling itself simply “Novo” in everyday communication, under the line “Lasting Health Starts Now” [14]. Novo Nordisk A/S is still the legal name, it is still what appears on US prescribing information and in FDA and SEC filings, and no product name changes — Ozempic is still Ozempic. If you see “Novo” on an advertisement or a website in late 2026, it is the same company.

This guide walks through who the company is, who controls it, where the drugs are physically made, how big the business has become, and why the company has been in the news so much lately. It is background information, not medical advice. Any question about whether a medicine is right for you belongs with a healthcare provider.

Who makes Ozempic and Wegovy?

Novo Nordisk makes all of the semaglutide products sold in the United States:

• Ozempic — weekly semaglutide injection, approved for type 2 diabetes
• Wegovy — weekly semaglutide injection, approved for chronic weight management
• Wegovy HD — a higher-dose (7.2 mg) weekly semaglutide injection approved in March 2026
• Wegovy pill — daily oral semaglutide 25 mg, approved for weight management in December 2025
• Ozempic pill — daily oral semaglutide for type 2 diabetes, launched in May 2026 to replace the Rybelsus brand in the United States [12]

All of these contain the same active ingredient, semaglutide. The brand name signals the approved use and the dose, not a different drug.

One point worth nailing down, because people mix it up constantly: Novo Nordisk does not make Mounjaro or Zepbound. Those contain tirzepatide and are made by Eli Lilly, an American company based in Indianapolis. Novo Nordisk also makes the older GLP-1 drugs Victoza and Saxenda, which contain liraglutide, a different and shorter-acting molecule that is now a small part of its sales [1].

How old is Novo Nordisk, and where did it come from?

Novo Nordisk dates itself to December 21, 1923 [5]. Its origin story is genuinely tied to the discovery of insulin.

In 1923, Danish scientist August Krogh and his wife Marie heard about insulin while on a lecture tour in the United States, changed their travel plans to meet the Canadian researchers who had isolated it, and came home with permission to produce it in Denmark [5]. The laboratory they set up became Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium in 1924. The following year, two former Nordisk employees — brothers Harald and Thorvald Pedersen — set up a rival called Novo Terapeutisk Laboratorium.

The two Danish insulin companies competed for more than sixty years. They merged in 1989 to form Novo Nordisk A/S, which at the time was the world’s largest insulin producer [5]. Along the way the company invented the first insulin pen, the NovoPen, in 1985 — the same basic device format used for Ozempic and Wegovy today.

That history matters for understanding the company’s current strategy. Novo Nordisk has been a metabolic-disease specialist for a hundred years, which is why chief executive Mike Doustdar has described recent cuts to peripheral research as “taking the company back to the DNA we have” [10].

Who owns Novo Nordisk?

This is the part that surprises most people. Novo Nordisk is controlled by a charity.

The Novo Nordisk Foundation is a Danish enterprise foundation whose own articles of association legally require it to keep a controlling interest in Novo Nordisk A/S [3]. It exercises that control through a wholly owned holding company, Novo Holdings A/S.

At the end of 2025, Novo Holdings owned about 28.1% of Novo Nordisk’s share capital but about 77.3% of the votes [3]. That gap exists because Novo Nordisk has two classes of shares. The unlisted A shares, held only by Novo Holdings, carry ten times the votes per krone of nominal value as the ordinary B shares that trade on Nasdaq Copenhagen and as ADRs in New York. The Foundation’s charter forbids it from selling those A shares.

So public investors own most of the company’s economics and a minority of its control. Other large holders at the end of 2025 included BlackRock (about 4.1%), Vanguard (about 2.9%) and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (about 1.8%) [5].

This is not just a governance curiosity. In 2025 the Foundation used that control to force out a sitting chief executive in May and then to replace most of the board at a special shareholder meeting in November [10]. Very few public companies anywhere can be reset that quickly by a single owner.

Novo Holdings also manages the Foundation’s broader investment portfolio, which held more than 170 companies at the end of 2025, and funds the Foundation’s grantmaking. The Foundation awarded DKK 11.8 billion in grants in 2025 [4].

Where is Ozempic actually manufactured?

Making semaglutide is a two-stage job, and the stages happen in different places.

Stage one: the active ingredient. Semaglutide is a peptide, and producing it at scale is chemically demanding. Most of the world’s supply comes from Kalundborg, Denmark, a town of roughly 16,000 people on the west coast of Zealand that has become one of the most important pharmaceutical sites on earth. Novo Nordisk announced a DKK 42 billion (about 5.6 billion euro) expansion there in 2023, adding a 170,000-square-meter multi-product active-ingredient facility and about 800 jobs. The company had spent DKK 23.1 billion of that by the end of 2025, with the site expected to be fully operational during 2029 [8].

Stage two: fill and finish. This is where the drug substance is put into pens, syringes or bottles under sterile conditions. Novo Nordisk does this in several places:

• Clayton, North Carolina — the main US site, with about 2,500 employees before a $4.1 billion expansion announced in June 2024 that adds 1.4 million square feet and roughly 1,000 jobs, due to finish between 2027 and 2029. It was described at the time as the largest life-sciences capital investment in North Carolina history [6][7].
• Bloomington, Indiana; Anagni, Italy; and Brussels, Belgium — three sterile fill-finish plants acquired in December 2024 as part of the Catalent transaction, employing more than 3,000 people between them [9].
• Hillerod, Denmark and Chartres, France, both of which have received multibillion-dollar expansions [5].

So the honest answer to “is Ozempic made in America?” is: partly. The molecule mostly starts in Denmark; a lot of the pens sold in the United States are finished in the United States.

That balance is shifting. In November 2025, as part of a broader pricing agreement, Novo Nordisk received three years of relief from prospective US pharmaceutical tariffs in exchange for committing to additional American manufacturing investment, which the administration put at $10 billion [10].

How big is Novo Nordisk’s business?

Very big, and until recently growing very fast. Here is the arc in the company’s own reported numbers, in Danish kroner [2][1]:

Year	Net sales (DKK bn)	Operating profit (DKK bn)	Employees
2021	140.8	58.6	48,478
2022	177.0	74.8	55,185
2023	232.3	102.6	64,319
2024	290.4	128.3	77,349
2025	309.1	127.7	69,505

For scale, DKK 309.1 billion works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of $45 to $48 billion depending on the exchange rate used, so treat any dollar figure as an estimate.

The workforce has kept shrinking since that table. Novo Nordisk’s own company boilerplate put the total at about 66,700 people in 80 countries in August 2026 and at over 67,000 in September 2026, after the restructuring announced in September 2025 [10][14].

Within 2025, the product split looked like this [1]:

• Ozempic: DKK 127.1 billion
• Wegovy: DKK 79.1 billion
• Rybelsus (now the Ozempic pill): DKK 22.1 billion
• All insulin: DKK 53.1 billion
• Rare disease: DKK 19.6 billion

Semaglutide products accounted for roughly two thirds of company sales. That concentration is the single most important fact about Novo Nordisk as a business. It is why a disappointing quarter for one molecule can knock tens of billions of dollars off the company’s value, and why the whole Danish economy pays attention to its earnings.

The United States is the biggest single market: US Operations generated DKK 173.2 billion of 2025 sales, about 56% of the total [1].

Why was Novo Nordisk in the news so much in 2025 and 2026?

Because it went from being the biggest company in Europe to a turnaround story in about eighteen months.

Novo Nordisk overtook LVMH as Europe’s most valuable listed company on September 1, 2023 [11]. Its US-listed shares peaked in June 2024. At the top, its market capitalization was larger than Denmark’s annual gross domestic product.

Then the direction reversed. Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide took the lead in the US obesity market, compounding pharmacies sold large volumes of copycat semaglutide during the shortage period, and US pricing came under political pressure. Novo Nordisk cut its 2025 forecasts three times, replaced its chief executive, cut about 9,000 jobs, and saw its share price fall 48% during 2025 alone [10][2].

That story is covered in detail in our companion piece on the 2025 crisis. The short version is that the company is still enormously profitable — DKK 127.7 billion of operating profit in 2025 — but it is no longer the fastest-growing large pharmaceutical company in the world, and it is fighting hard to get back.

Has Novo Nordisk been criticized for its prices?

Yes, repeatedly and publicly.

On September 24, 2024, then-chief executive Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen testified alone before the US Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Senator Bernie Sanders laid out the price gap: Ozempic listed at $969 a month in the United States against $155 in Canada, $122 in Denmark, $71 in France and $59 in Germany. Wegovy listed at $1,349 a month in the United States against $92 in the United Kingdom [13].

Since then the picture has changed substantially. Novo Nordisk opened its own cash-pay pharmacy, NovoCare, in March 2025; signed a most-favored-nation pricing agreement with the US administration in November 2025 that put Medicare and participating Medicaid prices at $245 a month; and announced in February 2026 that it would cut US list prices for Wegovy, Ozempic and Rybelsus to $675 a month starting January 1, 2027 [10].

What any individual pays still depends heavily on insurance, plan design and which channel the prescription runs through. Our access and pricing coverage goes through those details; a pharmacist or your plan’s benefits desk is the right place to confirm your own cost.

What should you take away from all this?

Three things.

First, one company makes all the semaglutide brands sold in the United States. If you are comparing Ozempic to Wegovy, you are comparing two products from the same manufacturer with the same active ingredient and different approved uses. If you are comparing Wegovy to Zepbound, you are comparing two different companies and two different molecules.

Second, Novo Nordisk’s unusual ownership structure has real consequences. A charitable foundation with permanent voting control can act faster and more bluntly than a normal board, which is exactly what happened in 2025.

Third, the company’s fortunes and the drug’s availability are linked but not the same thing. Novo Nordisk’s share price has fallen a long way from its 2024 peak, but its manufacturing capacity is larger than it has ever been, the US shortage ended, and it launched two new semaglutide formats in 2026. A bad year for the stock is not the same as a bad year for supply.

If you are weighing a GLP-1 medicine, none of this should drive your decision. Talk to a healthcare provider about whether one of these medicines fits your situation, what the side effects look like, and what your plan will actually cover.

Sources

1. Novo Nordisk financial report for 1 January to 31 December 2025 (Form 6-K) — Novo Nordisk A/S via SEC EDGAR, February 3, 2026
2. Five-year overview, Novo Nordisk Annual Report 2025 — Novo Nordisk A/S
3. Ownership — Novo Nordisk Foundation
4. Novo Holdings announces 2025 annual results — Novo Holdings A/S, March 12, 2026
5. Novo Nordisk — Wikipedia (company history and shareholder list)
6. Novo Nordisk announces 4.1 billion USD investment in US manufacturing — Novo Nordisk A/S, June 24, 2024
7. Novo Nordisk reveals plan to build $4.1B plant in North Carolina — Fierce Pharma, June 24, 2024
8. Novo Nordisk to invest 5.6 billion euros in expansion of API production in Denmark — CHEManager
9. Novo Holdings completes acquisition of Catalent — Novo Holdings A/S, December 18, 2024
10. Novo Nordisk financial report for 1 January to 30 June 2026 (Form 6-K) — Novo Nordisk A/S via SEC EDGAR, August 4, 2026
11. Novo Nordisk briefly overtakes LVMH as Europe’s most valuable company — Reuters, September 1, 2023
12. Novo Nordisk’s Rybelsus officially retired in US as ‘Ozempic pill’ takes branding center stage — Fierce Pharma, May 1, 2026
13. Prepared remarks: Sanders leads HELP Committee hearing with Novo Nordisk CEO — US Senator Bernie Sanders, September 24, 2024
14. Novo Nordisk enters next chapter to bring better health to more people, supported by ‘Novo’ rebrand and updated corporate culture — Novo Nordisk via GlobeNewswire, September 14, 2026