Novo Holdings saw its assets shrink by a third last year as part of the fallout of Novo Nordisk’s nosediving share price.
The Copenhagen-based firm, which is the controlling shareholder of Novo Nordisk, oversaw total assets of 694 billion Danish kroner ($107 billion) in 2025—a drop of 34% on the 1.06 trillion kroner ($160 billion) under its control in 2024, according to the firm’s annual results.
Novo Holdings said this change “primarily reflect[s] the significant drop in the market value of Novo Nordisk.” It’s true that 2025 was a tough year for the Danish pharma, the stock of which likewise sunk 34% from $83 to $54 over the 12-month period in the face of investor concerns about disappointing U.S. sales of its weight loss drug Wegovy.
The pressure to improve the pharma’s performance saw a new CEO installed in the shape of Maziar Mike Doustdar, a narrowed pipeline and about 9,000 employees laid off.
Novo Holdings’ role is to take the revenues from Novo Nordisk and make that money go further, typically by investing in private and publicly listed life sciences companies around the world. The firm ended 2025 with an investment portfolio of 170 companies.
Novo Holdings said its investments “continued to perform well on both an absolute and relative basis,” with a 9.2% return at a constant exchange rate (CER). However, an 11% fall in the value of the U.S. dollar against the kroner reduced this return to just 2.3% in absolute terms.
The firm’s CEO Kasim Kutay said the portfolio had “delivered a strong performance during the year,” pointing to “significant monetisations” from the $9 billion sale of clinical trial platform Clario to Thermo Fisher as well as exiting U.S. infusion therapy provider KabaFusion.
“As a response to market volatility, we took a cautious approach to new investments in early 2025,” Kutay said in the annual report.
“Gradually, we picked up the pace which resulted in the addition of 12 new portfolio companies,” he added. “Given the extreme volatility we experienced in parts of the market, I am pleased with the strong 9.2% CER return Novo Holdings generated in 2025, which comes on the heels of a 14.8% CER return in 2024.”
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With Novo Holdings’ future tied to Novo Nordisk, the firm could be in for another tricky year. While 2025 got off to a better start with the approval of the Wegovy pill making Novo Nordisk the first to market with an oral GLP-1, the failure of its GLP-1/amylin combo CagriSema to beat Eli Lilly’s Zepbound raised doubts about a key pillar in Novo Nordisk’s next-gen obesity strategy.
Against this backdrop, the pharma’s share price has sunk a further 24% so far this year to sit at $38.83 as of market close Wednesday.
