Bufetico
Shaun Gamble felt the mood in town shift last September. He owns a café that looks out over the harbor in Kalundborg, a small city on the Danish coast.
That was when Novo Nordisk, the company that makes Ozempic and Wegovy, said it would cut 9,000 jobs around the world, 5,000 of them in Denmark. Gamble knew a few of the people who were let go, and he told CNN this spring that it was quite dramatic. Novo didn’t say how many of the cuts were in Kalundborg. Fewer than 17,000 people live there, and Novo’s factory has around 10,000 people working at it, employees and contractors together, many of them from out of town. CNN puts Novo’s investment in the area since 2021 at $9.3 billion.
A few years ago Novo figured out that the drug in Ozempic, a diabetes medicine, also made people lose a lot of weight, and the Kalundborg factory started turning out Wegovy, which uses the same ingredient for weight loss. Danske Bank, the country’s biggest bank, credits Novo with keeping Denmark’s economy out of recession in 2023.
People used to commute from Kalundborg to Copenhagen, Martin Høgh Sørensen said, and now it’s the other way around. Sørensen was 69 when CNN talked to him, and he’s lived there a long time. He works for Novo Nordisk Engineering, a company that’s helping expand the factory, and CNN found him steering a sailboat off the harbor while his wife and two friends worked the ropes. Between the four of them, they’ve put in almost a hundred years at Novo or its sister company.
The mayor, Martin Damm, says more than a thousand homes are going up, and that local builders and electricians have sometimes had trouble hiring, because many people would rather work at Novo. For Sørensen, the catch is the car mechanics. Novo has hired so many of them, he said, that it’s hard to get your car fixed.
What a screener would have seen
Novo’s annual report shows sales growing 25.0 percent in 2024, before slowing to 6.4 percent in 2025. The operating margin, what’s left of each krone of sales after running the business, went from 44.2 percent to 41.3 percent, and most of that dip came from what Novo calls one-off restructuring costs.
Numbers like those are what a screener is built to catch. It asks every company on its list the same simple question at once, does it have this or not, and it doesn’t get tired at company number twenty thousand. I built one. It puts every company through six layers, one for each measure, and you can narrow it down by exchange. No screener can see behind a number, though. There are four questions no column can answer: whether a profit will happen again, whether an edge over rivals will last, whether growth came from the business itself or from buying other companies, and whether the people in charge are spending the money well. Novo has run into three of them this past year.
The edge and the factory
A steady margin is the mark an edge leaves behind. It doesn’t say how long the edge will last. Novo’s edge came from getting there first. Last year Eli Lilly’s drugs in the same family as Ozempic and Wegovy outsold Novo’s in the US for the first time, according to the investment firm Jefferies. And the patent on semaglutide, the ingredient in both, ran out this year in several countries, China and India among them. Novo’s chief executive, Mike Doustdar, told CNN that as the first mover, Novo made mistakes its competitors got to learn from. None of that’s in a margin. Neither is the other side of the coin: the pill version of Wegovy that Novo launched in the US in January passed five million prescriptions by August.
And there’s the factory Sørensen’s company is helping expand. In 2021 Novo spent 6,335 million Danish kroner on property, plant and equipment. In 2025, the year of the job cuts, it spent 60,140 million, more than nine times as much, mostly on more capacity to make its drugs. Whether that’s money well spent isn’t in any column, and nobody knows yet. A screener never meets the people who decide where it goes. It sees what they did once it lands in the accounts, and by then the money is spent.
Where this breaks
Earlier this month it turned out my model was reading the cash that moves through a bank, most of it other people’s money, as if it were the bank’s own, so financial companies now get a gray square where the valuation would be. Gray only protects against problems I’ve already found. That one showed up because sixty-seven financial companies had landed near the top of my list of the biggest gaps between price and value, when about nineteen would have been normal for their weight in the market. If the same flaw had touched a handful of companies scattered through the list, nothing would have stood out.
Something also has to be missing or broken for gray to kick in. A profit with no money behind it gets caught on the cash line. What no column catches is money that did come in and may not come again. Take Tesla: other carmakers pay it for regulatory credits they use to meet emissions rules, and that money comes in as cash like any other. Tesla’s own annual report says government action has already cut back some of those credit programs.
The café on the harbor
By spring, Gamble said, the feeling in town had settled down, and he hoped the layoffs had been a “glitch.” The day before CNN’s story ran, Novo reported its first quarter of 2026, and on the income statement, the page most screeners read, the boom looked like it was back: sales up 24 percent from a year earlier, operating profit up 54 percent.
More than a quarter of those sales, 26,760 million kroner, was a single entry that Novo itself says won’t happen again. Since 2021 it had been holding part of its US sales in reserve, in case it owed discounts under 340B, a federal program that makes drugmakers charge certain hospitals and clinics less. In January a decision in a dispute over those discounts became final in Novo’s favor, and everything still held back went into sales in one quarter. Novo says no cash came with it, and the cash its operations brought in that quarter was a little less than a year before. Without the entry, sales fell 10 percent and operating profit 15 percent in kroner, or 4 and 6 percent at the exchange rates of a year earlier. Novo’s own headline that day went with the smaller profit.