The Danish company developed the most lucrative new drug the world had ever seen. Then America's Eli Lilly outmaneuvered it and took control of the diet-drug market.
In August 2024, Novo Nordisk bused its employees to the sprawling Roskilde fairgrounds outside Copenhagen for its annual summer party. The Danish company had hosted the bash for many years, but in 2024 the event roughly doubled in size to an estimated 20,000 attendees, according to local press reports, reflecting the fresh hiring of thousands of employees. Singers performed on four stages, and the festivities went on past midnight.
At Novo Nordisk, it looked like the party would never end. Weeks earlier, in June 2024, the company's stock had soared to its all-time high, valuing the drugmaker at $658 billion, according to FactSet. This company from Denmark, a country with a population of about 6 million, had again become the biggest company in Europe by market capitalization.
Novo's success was fueled by one thing: semaglutide, a medication that mimics the naturally occurring hormone in the gut that signals to the brain it's not hungry, while regulating digestion and blood sugar. Novo branded the drug Ozempic for Type 2 diabetes and Wegovy for weight loss. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration first approved Ozempic in 2017, giving Novo a nearly five-year head start on Eli Lilly, the American pharmaceutical giant racing to catch up.
Amid explosive demand for Novo's drugs, the company grew so much it propped up Denmark's entire economy. In September 2024, Novo scientist Lotte Bjerre Knudsen won a prestigious award - one that scientists often win before receiving a Nobel Prize - for her pioneering work on GLP-1s. The same month, she was feted at New York City's Lincoln Center by the American Academy of Achievement alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Boston Red Sox owner John Henry.
"It was Disney World," said a former Novo employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity. There were "three-day offsites that could have been a two-hour meeting. No one asked how much something cost."
Back at Novo's offices, some employees were starting to question the company's strategy. Ozempic and Wegovy had been first to market and sold via injector pens, but Lilly had just launched a cheaper way to distribute tirzepatide, its GLP-1 for weight loss branded as Zepbound - in vials. Some people started asking in meetings why Novo wasn't using vials, according to former Novo employees. Lilly also had its own direct-to-consumer platform in the U.S., the world's biggest market, where Americans were increasingly using credit cards or plunking down cash for weight-loss drugs. Some employees began to openly question why Novo didn't have such a platform.
Within a year, it all fell apart. Novo (DK:NOVO.B) (NVO) lost its enormous lead and Lilly $(LLY)$ took control of the biggest pharmaceutical market of all time, in 2025 becoming the first drug company with a $1 trillion market capitalization. Novo's stock price tanked, tumbling 58% in a year from its high, and the company was recently valued at $201 billion, according to FactSet. Novo's board pushed out CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, and then most of the board members resigned. The company is now led by its first non-Danish CEO, Mike Doustdar, who has started to cut the bureaucracy and bloat. Under Doustdar, Novo announced plans to let go of 11.5% of its workforce in the largest corporate layoff in Denmark's history, according to local news reports. Knudsen, the scientist who shepherded semaglutide through clinical trials, left the company this spring, along with dozens of executives.
Novo "parlayed a market-leading position in the biggest drug discovery in decades into an investment disaster," Terry Smith, chief executive of London-based asset-management company Fundsmith, wrote in a letter in July, explaining why he pulled his entire investment in the drugmaker.
"There is no question about it," said U.S. investor Steve Eisman on his podcast. "Lilly has won the diet-drug wars."
Novo struggled to manufacture sufficient supply as people clamored for its GLP-1s. And as the competitive landscape shifted, the company doubled down on semaglutide, leaving it vulnerable to Lilly's focus on several different molecules and head-to-head trials. It also failed to pivot fast enough to respond to the rapidly changing ways weight-loss drugs were being sold to Americans, analysts and former employees say, adding that Novo's complicated culture was partly to blame.
The Danish executives "have this condescending view of American healthcare," a former Novo staffer said. "They didn't know what they didn't know."
"Individual employees will have different experiences and perspectives," Ambre James-Brown, a Novo spokesperson, said in a statement. She told MarketWatch that Novo remains focused on innovative science and methods of getting medicines to people who need them. "Our focus isn't on yesterday's milestones," James-Brown said. "It's on what's next. As a global healthcare company, we take a long-term view because improving health takes long-term thinking."
Some analysts say the GLP-1 race will remain competitive as weight-loss pills and new injections are introduced to the market. Still, Novo blowing its massive lead raises fresh questions about the ability of European companies to compete in key technologies defining the global economy, financial and economic analysts say. They point to Europe's strong pharmaceutical industry legacy and signs that it may be slipping.
"Novo Nordisk has been trying for decades to be Mr. Nice Guy," said Per Hansen, an economist with Nordnet Bank in Copenhagen. "We have to adapt a little bit to U.S. competitiveness, which is very fierce."
The rise of #Ozempic and the challenges of supplying it
When the FDA approved Ozempic in 2017 and Wegovy in 2021, hardly anyone batted an eye. At that time, Wegovy was largely viewed as an alternative to stomach-shrinking bariatric surgery, which was then the only way to medically lose more than 10% of your body weight. Some analysts believed the U.S. market for obesity medications could be worth $12 billion at most.
But within seven months of Wegovy's approval, Novo announced the medication was in short supply due to an external manufacturing issue. As the company worked on shoring up its manufacturing capacity, a cultural shift was under way that neither Novo nor Lilly predicted.
"There was unbelievable interest in these drugs, and you saw demand far outweigh the ability of these companies to produce the supply," said Sarah Emond, chief executive of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a U.S. drug-pricing watchdog. "We've never seen anything like this in the pharmaceutical space."
Americans became desperate for Wegovy and off-label prescriptions of Ozempic to help them lose weight. Think pieces in major media outlets described the injection as a "coveted accessory" for wealthy people and a "watershed moment for scientific discovery." In late 2022, Elon Musk posted that he lost 30 pounds by fasting and taking semaglutide. On social media, #Ozempic generated hundreds of millions of views as influencers and everyday users posted about their physical transformations. Novo, which had been selling insulin for more than a century, didn't run its first ad campaign for Wegovy until 2023.
That was partly because Wegovy remained in short supply. So did Ozempic and, later, Lilly's GIP/GLP-1 agonist, which was approved as Mounjaro for Type 2 diabetes in mid-2022 and as Zepbound for weight loss in late 2023. Both companies were unprepared for the demand. Novo CEO Doustdar told "The Journal" podcast earlier this year that the company had to figure out that people seeking weight-loss drugs were acting more like consumers than patients, paying with cash or credit cards to get prescriptions from online doctors.
"They didn't think that obesity was their market," said Evan David Seigerman, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets who covers Novo and Lilly. "Lars and the management team underinvested in manufacturing," he said, referring to the former Novo CEO.
Novo Holdings - the drugmaker's controlling shareholder - came up with an idea in late 2023 to resolve the shortages. Instead of waiting years to construct new plants, Novo Holdings spent $16.5 billion to buy a contract manufacturer called Catalent and then sold three Catalent facilities to Novo Nordisk, which paid $11.7 billion for them. At first glance, the deal was a one-and-done solution to Novo's problems: Buy a third-party pharmaceutical manufacturer with factories in the U.S. and Europe, and control your supply chain.
Except Catalent was a company that had grown fast when it ramped up to produce COVID-19 vaccines, and it came with known manufacturing issues. Catalent had already slashed its guidance, the FDA had raised concerns about contamination in some of its plants, and Lilly is a customer, creating a potential conflict of interest. (Lilly still works with Catalent, although a spokesperson described the relationship as "limited.")
The trouble didn't stop there. Federal inspectors detailed multiple instances of mammalian hair found in drugs produced at a Catalent plant in Bloomington, Ind., used in part to manufacture semaglutide. The FDA also rejected several drugs developed by other companies that are manufactured at the facility, corporate filings show.
It wasn't until early 2025 that the FDA removed semaglutide from its list of drugs in short supply. In the intervening years, however, a cottage industry of compounding pharmacies emerged, including Ro and Hims & Hers Health. If a patented drug is listed by the U.S. government as in short supply, compounders can legally produce it. Local medical spas were also illegally making or buying their own versions of the drugs and selling them to patients.
MW How Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk blew its lead in GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. Can Europe compete in the high-stakes global economy?
By Jaimy Lee and Steve Goldstein
The Danish company developed the most lucrative new drug the world had ever seen. Then America's Eli Lilly outmaneuvered it and took control of the diet-drug market.
In August 2024, Novo Nordisk bused its employees to the sprawling Roskilde fairgrounds outside Copenhagen for its annual summer party. The Danish company had hosted the bash for many years, but in 2024 the event roughly doubled in size to an estimated 20,000 attendees, according to local press reports, reflecting the fresh hiring of thousands of employees. Singers performed on four stages, and the festivities went on past midnight.
At Novo Nordisk, it looked like the party would never end. Weeks earlier, in June 2024, the company's stock had soared to its all-time high, valuing the drugmaker at $658 billion, according to FactSet. This company from Denmark, a country with a population of about 6 million, had again become the biggest company in Europe by market capitalization.
Novo's success was fueled by one thing: semaglutide, a medication that mimics the naturally occurring hormone in the gut that signals to the brain it's not hungry, while regulating digestion and blood sugar. Novo branded the drug Ozempic for Type 2 diabetes and Wegovy for weight loss. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration first approved Ozempic in 2017, giving Novo a nearly five-year head start on Eli Lilly, the American pharmaceutical giant racing to catch up.
Amid explosive demand for Novo's drugs, the company grew so much it propped up Denmark's entire economy. In September 2024, Novo scientist Lotte Bjerre Knudsen won a prestigious award - one that scientists often win before receiving a Nobel Prize - for her pioneering work on GLP-1s. The same month, she was feted at New York City's Lincoln Center by the American Academy of Achievement alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Boston Red Sox owner John Henry.
"It was Disney World," said a former Novo employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity. There were "three-day offsites that could have been a two-hour meeting. No one asked how much something cost."
Back at Novo's offices, some employees were starting to question the company's strategy. Ozempic and Wegovy had been first to market and sold via injector pens, but Lilly had just launched a cheaper way to distribute tirzepatide, its GLP-1 for weight loss branded as Zepbound - in vials. Some people started asking in meetings why Novo wasn't using vials, according to former Novo employees. Lilly also had its own direct-to-consumer platform in the U.S., the world's biggest market, where Americans were increasingly using credit cards or plunking down cash for weight-loss drugs. Some employees began to openly question why Novo didn't have such a platform.
Within a year, it all fell apart. Novo (DK:NOVO.B) (NVO) lost its enormous lead and Lilly (LLY) took control of the biggest pharmaceutical market of all time, in 2025 becoming the first drug company with a $1 trillion market capitalization. Novo's stock price tanked, tumbling 58% in a year from its high, and the company was recently valued at $201 billion, according to FactSet. Novo's board pushed out CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, and then most of the board members resigned. The company is now led by its first non-Danish CEO, Mike Doustdar, who has started to cut the bureaucracy and bloat. Under Doustdar, Novo announced plans to let go of 11.5% of its workforce in the largest corporate layoff in Denmark's history, according to local news reports. Knudsen, the scientist who shepherded semaglutide through clinical trials, left the company this spring, along with dozens of executives.
Novo "parlayed a market-leading position in the biggest drug discovery in decades into an investment disaster," Terry Smith, chief executive of London-based asset-management company Fundsmith, wrote in a letter in July, explaining why he pulled his entire investment in the drugmaker.
"There is no question about it," said U.S. investor Steve Eisman on his podcast. "Lilly has won the diet-drug wars."
Novo struggled to manufacture sufficient supply as people clamored for its GLP-1s. And as the competitive landscape shifted, the company doubled down on semaglutide, leaving it vulnerable to Lilly's focus on several different molecules and head-to-head trials. It also failed to pivot fast enough to respond to the rapidly changing ways weight-loss drugs were being sold to Americans, analysts and former employees say, adding that Novo's complicated culture was partly to blame.
The Danish executives "have this condescending view of American healthcare," a former Novo staffer said. "They didn't know what they didn't know."
"Individual employees will have different experiences and perspectives," Ambre James-Brown, a Novo spokesperson, said in a statement. She told MarketWatch that Novo remains focused on innovative science and methods of getting medicines to people who need them. "Our focus isn't on yesterday's milestones," James-Brown said. "It's on what's next. As a global healthcare company, we take a long-term view because improving health takes long-term thinking."
Some analysts say the GLP-1 race will remain competitive as weight-loss pills and new injections are introduced to the market. Still, Novo blowing its massive lead raises fresh questions about the ability of European companies to compete in key technologies defining the global economy, financial and economic analysts say. They point to Europe's strong pharmaceutical industry legacy and signs that it may be slipping.
"Novo Nordisk has been trying for decades to be Mr. Nice Guy," said Per Hansen, an economist with Nordnet Bank in Copenhagen. "We have to adapt a little bit to U.S. competitiveness, which is very fierce."
The rise of #Ozempic and the challenges of supplying it
When the FDA approved Ozempic in 2017 and Wegovy in 2021, hardly anyone batted an eye. At that time, Wegovy was largely viewed as an alternative to stomach-shrinking bariatric surgery, which was then the only way to medically lose more than 10% of your body weight. Some analysts believed the U.S. market for obesity medications could be worth $12 billion at most.
But within seven months of Wegovy's approval, Novo announced the medication was in short supply due to an external manufacturing issue. As the company worked on shoring up its manufacturing capacity, a cultural shift was under way that neither Novo nor Lilly predicted.
"There was unbelievable interest in these drugs, and you saw demand far outweigh the ability of these companies to produce the supply," said Sarah Emond, chief executive of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a U.S. drug-pricing watchdog. "We've never seen anything like this in the pharmaceutical space."
Americans became desperate for Wegovy and off-label prescriptions of Ozempic to help them lose weight. Think pieces in major media outlets described the injection as a "coveted accessory" for wealthy people and a "watershed moment for scientific discovery." In late 2022, Elon Musk posted that he lost 30 pounds by fasting and taking semaglutide. On social media, #Ozempic generated hundreds of millions of views as influencers and everyday users posted about their physical transformations. Novo, which had been selling insulin for more than a century, didn't run its first ad campaign for Wegovy until 2023.
That was partly because Wegovy remained in short supply. So did Ozempic and, later, Lilly's GIP/GLP-1 agonist, which was approved as Mounjaro for Type 2 diabetes in mid-2022 and as Zepbound for weight loss in late 2023. Both companies were unprepared for the demand. Novo CEO Doustdar told "The Journal" podcast earlier this year that the company had to figure out that people seeking weight-loss drugs were acting more like consumers than patients, paying with cash or credit cards to get prescriptions from online doctors.
"They didn't think that obesity was their market," said Evan David Seigerman, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets who covers Novo and Lilly. "Lars and the management team underinvested in manufacturing," he said, referring to the former Novo CEO.
Novo Holdings - the drugmaker's controlling shareholder - came up with an idea in late 2023 to resolve the shortages. Instead of waiting years to construct new plants, Novo Holdings spent $16.5 billion to buy a contract manufacturer called Catalent and then sold three Catalent facilities to Novo Nordisk, which paid $11.7 billion for them. At first glance, the deal was a one-and-done solution to Novo's problems: Buy a third-party pharmaceutical manufacturer with factories in the U.S. and Europe, and control your supply chain.
Except Catalent was a company that had grown fast when it ramped up to produce COVID-19 vaccines, and it came with known manufacturing issues. Catalent had already slashed its guidance, the FDA had raised concerns about contamination in some of its plants, and Lilly is a customer, creating a potential conflict of interest. (Lilly still works with Catalent, although a spokesperson described the relationship as "limited.")
The trouble didn't stop there. Federal inspectors detailed multiple instances of mammalian hair found in drugs produced at a Catalent plant in Bloomington, Ind., used in part to manufacture semaglutide. The FDA also rejected several drugs developed by other companies that are manufactured at the facility, corporate filings show.
It wasn't until early 2025 that the FDA removed semaglutide from its list of drugs in short supply. In the intervening years, however, a cottage industry of compounding pharmacies emerged, including Ro and Hims & Hers Health. If a patented drug is listed by the U.S. government as in short supply, compounders can legally produce it. Local medical spas were also illegally making or buying their own versions of the drugs and selling them to patients.
(MORE TO FOLLOW) Dow Jones Newswires
August 05, 2026 12:53 ET (16:53 GMT)
MW How Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk blew its lead -2-
Lilly had its own struggles producing enough tirzepatide, but it quickly turned to new ideas that aligned with the way many patients were behaving - like consumers, not patients.
The company launched LillyDirect, a direct-to-consumer platform that connects prospective patients with physicians, in January 2024 and started selling Zepbound in vials, which are cheaper and easier to make, to the growing number of cash-paying customers later that year.
Lilly's tirzepatide came off the FDA's drug-shortage list two months earlier than semaglutide, and Lilly kept pressing its advantage. Earlier this year, it came out with the multidose KwikPen for Zepbound, which is less expensive than the single-dose pen. The KwikPen is what is available to Medicare beneficiaries.
The company now plans to keep its manufacturing capacity at around 80% to 90% to ensure there's room to ramp up in case demand for its medicines spikes again, according to Chief Financial Officer Lucas Montarce. It's something Lilly has never done before.
"This is about Lilly's ability as a U.S. company to turn on a dime to increase manufacturing," said a former Novo employee and longtime industry strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
'They bet the house on semaglutide'
Around 2018, it became clear that semaglutide didn't just help people with diabetes better manage their blood sugar. It also helped them lose weight - a lot of it.
The leaders at Lilly paid very close attention to semaglutide, according to Jan Lundberg, who ran research and development at Lilly from 2010 to 2018. Lundberg, a Swede who is now retired, quit a prominent job at AstraZeneca in London to take a position at Lilly's headquarters in Indianapolis.
Lilly doubled down on R&D, albeit with some failures, as part of an internal strategy called "timely valued medicines" that prioritized experimental therapies that could beat the standard of care, according to Lundberg. Instead of putting another GLP-1 like semaglutide into trials, Lilly decided to pair a GLP-1 with a GIP receptor agonist in what Lundberg described as a "very close collaboration between R&D and the business unit." This combo would become tirzepatide, the main ingredient in Mounjaro and Zepbound.
"When the semaglutide data came, Lilly wanted to create something as good or superior to semaglutide quickly," Lundberg said.
In early 2018, Novo produced data showing that semaglutide helped people with obesity lose 13.8% of their body weight. But by October of the same year, Lilly started pointing out that tirzepatide could also help people lose weight, although it wouldn't launch an obesity-specific trial until 2019. Lundberg said Lilly initiated head-to-head studies comparing tirzepatide to semaglutide by mid-2019. That was "one reason for our success," he said.
In the most important Phase 3 trials, Zepbound's highest dose instigated a 20.9% weight loss, while Wegovy's produced a 14.9% weight loss. And in a head-to-head trial designed by Lilly, Zepbound also came out on top. Not only did Zepbound help people lose more weight, some doctors believed it came with fewer of the gastrointestinal side effects that make it hard for some patients to stay on these drugs.
"All my new starts are usually going to be Mounjaro and Zepbound," said Scott Isaacs, an endocrinologist in Atlanta who used to consult for Novo. "Why not start with the best?"
By 2025, Lilly took the lead in the booming market for weight-loss drugs. Tirzepatide generated $36.5 billion in revenue in 2025. By contrast, Novo Nordisk's semaglutide franchise posted about $33.5 billion in revenue last year.
Lilly and Novo's strategies have continued to diverge. Lilly now has two GLP-1 drugs for weight loss - Zepbound and the new GLP-1 pill Foundayo - and two more in the works.
It's also developing retatrutide - a highly efficacious injection that pairs GLP-1 and GIP with glucagon - which could be approved in late 2027 or early 2028, bringing in $5.4 billion in estimated annual sales by 2030, according to analyst estimates compiled by FactSet. Not only did retatrutide produce 28% average weight loss in a clinical trial, a less powerful dose delivered the same weight loss as Zepbound - with high tolerability. And it already has a place in the culture. People are buying the raw ingredients from China and mixing their own versions of the drug at home. They call it "ratatouille" or "reta."
Another experimental Lilly drug called eloralintide is even better on the tolerability front, potentially setting up the medication for use on its own or with other medications. The amylin injection is in Phase 3 studies, with clinical data arriving possibly by 2028 and sales of $2.6 billion by 2030.
Lilly "has the pieces in place to further raise the standard of care in the obesity space," J.P. Morgan analysts wrote in a note in June. "We see the company, if anything, further extending its leadership position in the $200bn+ incretin/obesity market longer term."
Meanwhile, Novo's weight-loss strategy hinges almost entirely on semaglutide. It sells semaglutide as an injection, a high-dose injection and a pill. Even its experimental next-generation shot, CagriSema, includes semaglutide.
Novo revealed in February that Lilly's Zepbound outperformed its own experimental next-generation shot in a clinical trial that Novo itself designed. Its stock fell 16.5% that day.
"They bet the house on semaglutide," said Michael Leuchten, a longtime industry analyst at Jefferies. "Yes, there were manufacturing or capacity issues. Yes, there was a misunderstanding of what the obesity market would be, but I think in fairness, if Novo had the lineup of assets that Lilly created, their life might have been more easy."
One novel asset in Novo's pipeline is zenagamtide, a GLP-1/amylin agonist, which is in Phase 3 trials as an injection and is also being tested as a pill. It also moved a triple agonist similar to retatrutide into Phase 2 trials this year. But Novo's future is still tied up with semaglutide. CagriSema, which could get approved in December, is expected to produce about $4.3 billion in obesity sales by 2030, according to a FactSet estimate. The Wegovy pill is widely considered to have had the best pharmaceutical launch of all time. Lilly's GLP-1 pill Foundayo, approved four months later, is still playing catch-up.
The pills, which are less effective than injections, are commonly used by people who want to lose less weight or are trying to maintain their weight loss after using the injectable drugs. Younger people and men also prefer the pill over an injection, according to Novo. The pills are important to both companies' growing GLP-1 franchises, though analysts say injections will still account for the lion's share of the GLP-1 market, and any newer, more effective shots like retatrutide will be reserved for people with severe obesity under clinical oversight.
"I don't think the race is finished," said Stephen Farrelly, global lead for pharmaceuticals and healthcare at Dutch bank ING Group. "We do believe this is going to be a massive new industry. There's a long road left to run on GLP."
Wegovy has claimed several other follow-on FDA approvals, such as for reducing the risk of cardiovascular events like heart attacks, but it was Lilly that pursued approval of a GLP-1 for sleep apnea, opening the door to a lucrative category without a single other competing medication.
"It wasn't so much that [Lilly] would really make different decisions from Novo," said Brian Smith, a management professor at the University of Hertfordshire and an adviser to pharmaceutical companies. "It's that they just made them faster."
'There was a culture that wasn't rewarding performance'
Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen was paid tens of million of dollars less as CEO of Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk than his counterpart at U.S. rival Eli Lilly.
Inside Novo's offices, factories and headquarters - which is designed in the shape of an insulin molecule - a Danish ethos of humbleness rules, analysts and former employees say. Workers speak directly with each other, something that several former employees in the U.S. told MarketWatch they appreciated. The focus has been on consensus, rather than making quick decisions, they added. Jørgensen, the former CEO, took the bus to work events and raised his hand to speak on Microsoft Teams calls, according to Nadeem Sarwar, a former Novo employee who posted online about his experience at the company. Jørgensen worked in a co-working space shared with colleagues and espoused "the Novo Nordisk way," telling "60 Minutes": "The values are based on ordinary human decent values." Jørgensen declined to comment.
Novo didn't pay its executives top dollar. Jørgensen earned about $8 million at Novo in 2024, while Lilly CEO David Ricks received a compensation package of $29.2 million, regulatory filings show.
Novo spent a lot of money on other things, however. It hired a net 28,800 employees between 2022 and 2024, a 60% headcount increase in three years, according to the company's annual reports, resulting in a workforce of 77,349. Lilly ended that same year with 47,000 employees. Novo's capital expenditures skyrocketed by 664% in three years to about $6.5 billion in 2024, regulatory filings show, not including the $11 billion acquisition of Catalent's manufacturing facilities. Its operating expenses soared some 80% in three years to about $16.8 billion in 2024.
Novo's spending ramped up so much that it became one of the top employers in Denmark. Denmark's economy grew 1.8% in 2023, driven nearly completely by Novo's manufacturing output, according to Statistics Denmark. The rest of the Danish economy shrank.