Why isn’t Wegovy diet pills’ £6bn Danish town booming?

Kalundborg, a town of just 16,000 people on the Danish coast, is about an hour’s drive from Copenhagen, as close as you can get to a modern-day gold rush town.

This is the main production center of Wegovy weight loss pills. Semaglutide, used in Wegovy and the diabetes drug Ozempic, are produced at a factory hereand parent company Novo Nordisk have invested more than $8.5 billion in the town. That’s almost Monaco’s entire GDP.

But convincing people to actually live in town can be difficult.

There is one Streams of workers and construction workers flocked to the factory in the morning and a migration in the afternoon – locals call it the “Novo Queue” and advise you to avoid making your way into town during these hours every day.

Almost no workers stay – they live outside and drive in.

So when there’s £400,000 invested per resident, what’s not to like?

Behind the bright numbers, Kalundborg faces many challenges, from run-down schools, low income to many overweight children.

State school scores in Danish and maths here are below the national average. Some areas on the outskirts of town have few facilities inside or out, just old playground swings.

“If you saw that, you would go to one of the big cities around here and say, ‘Well, we’ll live there and then I can drive to Kalundborg to work,’” said the councilor. Helle area Laursen Petersen told me.

She said these schools are having difficulty attracting experienced teachers, leaving many parents with low expectations.

After all, she said, they thought their children would always get jobs at the Novo Nordisk factory, so why bother trying to go to college?

Ali, Anna K, Anna and Marie at Gymnasium, the most academically strong high school in the area, told me they wanted to leave to go to school.

“It might get interesting later, but for now, I think settling here is a bit boring – I think I’d prefer a big city,” says Anna K.

But Ali and Marie are more excited to return after school, hoping there are more job opportunities in town so they can enjoy its natural beauty more.

Meanwhile, Brian Sonder Anderson, who runs the Blue Angel cinema and heads the local traders’ association, points out that supermarkets and bakeries are booming locally as factory workers flock arrived at lunch break.

But other stores, such as those selling shoes and clothing, quickly opened and then closed again as workers lived elsewhere.

Many low-income families live here, which is more expensive than the capital Copenhagen, where rent and real estate prices have skyrocketed – leaving some people on benefits and others relying on local jobs. factory.

Kalundborg also has a health problem – it is the 5% of towns in Denmark with the highest proportion of overweight children.

Meanwhile, Novo Nordisk is is currently the most valuable company in Europe with revenue last year of more than $33 billion – bringing its market value to more than $500 billion.

The investment in the town is aimed at creating an additional 1,250 jobs for the 4,500 existing employees at the Kalundborg plant and boosting production of best-selling drugs. Although the company represents about 1% of Denmark’s workforce, it accounts for a larger share of the company’s growth.

Denmark’s economic growth was 1.1% in the first nine months of 2023. However, the elimination of the pharmaceutical sector, dominated by Novo, caused the economy to contract by 0.8%. Some analysts have warned that parts of the country’s economy are at risk of becoming too dependent on the pharmaceutical industry.

Town mayor Martin Damm is optimistic, noting that more than 1,000 new jobs are being created here each year and that a number of young people happily call the place home.

“In Europe, people are moving from rural areas to big cities and it’s happening in the opposite direction,” he said.

“This is a small city [that] attract large investments”.

He also emphasized that schools are being refurbished or already have good facilities – and that increasing prosperity over time will lead to healthier lifestyles.

Miguel, an 18-year-old student from Madrid studying biotechnology on one of the new university courses in town, has just joined a local football team with players from Brazil, Mexico, Poland and Ukraine.

“There are a lot of international people in this town and almost everyone I talked to in English answered in English,” he said.

Amanda, from Brazil, insists the opportunity is here – she has found a job, sent her two young children to a local school and hopes they will stay here to study at university.

A new motorway is also being built to help ease the town’s chronic congestion – but bringing people to live here would be the real solution to that problem.

The students at the Gymnasium think the town is at some crossroads.

“In five years, I think the town [will have] growing quite a bit – I hope for a multicultural town,” said Anna K.

“If so, I might consider coming back.”