What happened
The broader stock market might have been a bit sluggish in the summer heat on Monday, but investors didn't hesitate to pile into Novo Nordisk (NVO 3.11%). Shares of the pharmaceutical company behind hotly popular weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy rose by over 2% on the day, well exceeding the less than 0.2% increase of the S&P 500 index. The company's latest financial engineering news was a big reason why.
So what
In a regulatory filing, Novo Nordisk showed that it is putting its money where its mouth is. It detailed a series of share buybacks it had made recently and provided an updated total.
Last week, it repurchased a total of 436,500 of its B shares. That brings the total under the program so far to just under 13.6 million shares, at an average share price of slightly more than 1,074 Danish kronor ($159) apiece.
The pharmaceutical company's current stock buyback program was launched at the end of January. It was to last one year, with the company purchasing up to 28 billion kronor ($4.1 billion) worth of B shares. Barely over three months later, it announced within its first-quarter earnings release that it was expanding the program by 2 billion kronor ($296 million) to a new total of 30 billion kronor ($4.4 billion).
Now what
Novo Nordisk doesn't particularly need to boost shareholder sentiment with stock buybacks, but they sure don't hurt. It's rather flush these days thanks to the very buzzy Ozempic and Wegovy, so we can fully expect a continued stream of repurchases by the company. We also shouldn't be surprised to see the program expanded, extended, renewed, or all three.
