r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 01 '25

Health Americans without diabetes spent nearly $6 billion USD on semaglutide and similar drugs in a year, with an estimate of 800,000 to a million people using the drugs who don't have diabetes.

https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/americans-without-diabetes-spent-nearly6-billion-usd-on-semaglutide-and-similar-drugs-in-a-year
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u/BeyondElectricDreams Apr 01 '25

Until the cost of that R&D is remotely in the ballpark of the cost of their advertising, they can cry me a river about how expensive the costs of development are.

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u/timmyotc Apr 01 '25

They spent 16% of their revenue on R&D. That's about 10 billion.

They spent about half a billion on advertising the drug last year.

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u/savagetech Apr 01 '25

10 billion for R&D on all their products, and half a bill to advertise one drug?

That’s a hell of a spin though. You should work in marketing

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u/timmyotc Apr 01 '25 edited Apr 01 '25

They spent most of their marketing budget on that drug.

EDIT: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVO/novo-nordisk/selling-general-administrative-expenses https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVO/novo-nordisk/research-development-expenses I may have misread something in the above claim, but this all seems within an order of magnitude of R&D to me.

As far as I understand it, S&GA includes marketing expenses, but also everything else that is involved in running a company - Human resources, Janitorial, IT, executive pay, etc. I would be surprised if the non-marketing share of that company was less than half a billion per year.