David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…You got to remember too, in the 70s, there was still a functioning healthcare market. There wasn't massive consolidation yet, so every level was super fragmented. Manufacturers were fragmented, insurance companies were smaller, little doctor's offices existed everywhere, neighborhood pharmacies were there. Entering the American market, you didn't necessarily need huge scale to do it. The other thing to note is it wasn't yet the heyday of drugs of pharma. There weren't that many drugs that people had high demand for. It wasn't like today where everywhere you look, there's some amazing drug that could save your life depending on what conditions you have that are on TV commercials. The federal government with, and we'll get into this later, but Medicare Part D wasn't even a thing yet. Drugs were not plentiful enough and good enough yet for the government to cover them as an insurance benefit for people over 65. That's the era we're in, where if Nordisk wants to enter the American market, they can without too many barriers. Yeah, this is the right window. I don't know how Brenham convinced both boards to do this, but he does. My God, he's right. It works. For the entire decade of the 1970s, Nordisk's sales grow at 30% compounded annually, which is amazing. They're still small. By 1980, Nordisk is still only about 1/10 the size of Novo overall, but they're a third the size of Novo's Insulin business. They've moved from being this licensing company to now an actual production company with capacity all around the world. This is a huge win from basically, they were going to be taken over for cash by their old rivals, and now they're back in the game. Novo in response, they need to do something to get capital. They actually do a small IPO on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange in 1974 to raise the capital they need for the transition to MC Insulin. By the time we get to 1980 and just to set some scale here, Novo's annual global Insulin sales are still much larger. They're about a hundred million dollars annually, and Nordisks are about $30 million annually. That makes them the number two and number four producers in the world by market share behind Eli Lilly in America, who's first, with about $160 million in sales. By the way, these numbers are staggeringly small. These are Series C startup.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.