Hims & Hers Made a Surprising Concession to End Its GLP‑1 Beef With Novo Nordisk

Both companies’ stocks rose in the wake of the news.

BY ANNABEL BURBA, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT @ANNIEBURBA

Hims & Hers and Novo Nordisk’s very public eight-month-long feud over GLP-1 drugs just came to an end. Today, the two former rivals officially announced that they’re putting down their dukes and teaming up to sell weight-loss drugs online.

Both companies made concessions in order to broker the deal, according to Bloomberg. Novo will drop the lawsuit it filed against Hims & Hers in February and start selling its popular GLP-1 medicine brands Ozempic and Wegovy on the telehealth platform.

Hims & Hers, on the other hand, will stop advertising copycat versions of Novo drugs. It’ll continue selling Wegovy and Ozempic knockoffs to patients whose doctors deem them to be necessary, per Bloomberg. Still, it’s a surprising reversal of strategy for the San Francisco-based company, which recently paid around $16 million to produce a Super Bowl ad centered around the democratization of health care. 

Compounded drugs are custom-made medications created by compounding pharmacies, which sometimes use the same active ingredients found in the name-brand medications from pharmaceutical companies like Novo or Eli Lilly. These products are cheaper to produce—but also more controversial—because they’re exempt from Food and Drug Administration approval. In the past, compounded drugs seemed to be a core part of Hims & Hers’ mission to close what it calls the “health gap.”

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Tensions first rose between Novo and Hims & Hers last June. The Danish drugmaker pulled out of an agreement to sell its products through Hims & Hers over the telehealth company’s efforts to produce and market a compounded version of Wegovy. Following that announcement, Hims & Hers stock fell by more than 30 percent.

Novo’s CEO Mike Doustdar told Bloomberg the two companies’ goals didn’t align at the time.

About seven months later, Hims & Hers launched a $49 compounded GLP-1 weight-loss pill that mimics semaglutide, the active drug Novo uses in both Wegovy and Ozempic. The pharmaceutical company, whose medicines previously cost about $1,000 without insurance, then threatened legal action. That, along with a warning from the FDA, was enough to convince Hims & Hers to pull the product.

When news broke on Friday that the companies were planning to put their differences aside, their stocks rose. Hims & Hers got the lion’s share of the upside, with an almost 40 percent bump over the last five days, while Novo’s shares rose by roughly 9 percent.

“When you want to make an agreement with anyone, you really need to know exactly what that agreement is,” Doustdar said to Bloomberg. “I take my time, and then when I do it, more times than not, we do it right.”

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