The head of the generic drug manufacturer Sandoz Group expects a large market for copycat products of the popular weight loss pills.
However, the manager did not dare to predict exactly how big this could be. “I’ve been in the generics business for 35 years and have never seen a product where the market size is virtually unknown when you change the pricing dynamics,” Sandoz CEO Richard Saynor said in an interview. The patent on semaglutide, the main active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster diabetes and obesity drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, expired in several countries earlier this year. This opens the door for generic competition and heralds a new phase in the battle for the market. After India approved the first generic versions of semaglutide earlier this year, Canada began issuing approvals last week. The Indian company Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories was the first to receive the green light from Canadian regulators for a generic injection, with Canadian company Apotex following just days later.
Sandoz plans to launch its own generic version of semaglutide in Canada and Brazil later this year, Saynor said. The company sees these markets as testing grounds before semaglutide goes off patent in Europe and the US in the 2030s. “I describe our launches in Brazil and Canada as an experiment to see how the markets evolve, what the price points are, how different patient segments want different products and how governments respond to that product,” added Saynor.
Sandoz said a potential launch of generic semaglutide was not yet factored into its 2026 forecast. The company was spun off from Novartis in 2023, and at that time its mid-term goals for 2028 did not include obesity drugs. Analysts polled by Visible Alpha forecast Sandoz’s generic semaglutide sales to be $31.7 million this year, which could climb to $103 million next year, $203.7 million in 2030 and $742.6 million in 2035.
“I haven’t given the market a forecast because I honestly don’t know. And I know that anything I say will be wrong, so I’d rather not say anything,” said Saynor. Market expectations for generic anti-obesity drugs remain an open question because this is a rare market where even the companies behind the brand-name drugs have at times struggled to keep up with demand, said David Wallace, senior analyst at pharmaceutical research firm Citeline. “Although we have already seen initial generic launches in certain markets worldwide, the full impact of competition is yet to be seen as some leading GLP-1 brands have not yet lost their exclusivity in key markets such as Europe and the US,” Wallace said. “If generic competition kicks in, demand could be significant.”
What sales generics ultimately achieve is a central question for the future of the weight loss market, which is expected to exceed $100 billion in 2031, according to consensus estimates from market research firm Evaluate Pharma.
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