Hims Wants to Keep Mailing You Copycat GLP-1s. It’s Getting Trickier.

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1:18I can clear my search history, but I can never unsee that. Don't go down the rabbit hole. Amazon Health AI gets you the right care fast. Health care just got less painful. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. ED is personal. And now, so is treating him. Introducing Hard Miss, wintergreen-flavored prescription chewables available in a variety of doses using doctor-trusted ingredients. The telehealth company HIMSS has been around since 2017. It burst onto the scene as a direct-to-consumer disruptor with the goal of making it easy to get medications in the mail. If prescribed, hard mints are uniquely formulated and shipped directly.

2:08Instead of having to go to a pharmacy to pick up name-brand drugs like Viagra or Rogaine, with HIMSS, you can get screened for compounded versions online and have them delivered to your door discreetly. When it first started, it was sort of millennial-aged guys who were too embarrassed to go to their doctors to ask for hair loss treatments or ED treatments. That's Madison Muller, who covers health care for Bloomberg News. And they've sort of evolved from there into a suite of other medications for kind of like, in some ways, chasing the next big thing or what's big at the moment. And one of those next big things was weight loss shots.

2:49When drugs like Ozempic and Wegovi and Zepan and Manjaro were in shortage over the last couple of years, that allowed pharmacies to step in to make copycat versions of them. When name-brand drugs are in short supply in the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration allows some pharmacies to make what are called compounded versions to fill the gap. That's what happened in late 2022, when Wegovi first went into shortage. And in May of last year, HIMSS announced its copycat version of the shots. The company saw its stock spike by almost 40%. But less than a year later, in February of 2025, the FDA announced that shortage was over, which raises the question, what will happen if HIMSS's big bet on weight loss shots doesn't pan out?

3:35They were really going all in on weight loss drugs, and it seemed like it sort of caught them by surprise, the end of the shortage. I mean, they had just run this massive Super Bowl campaign earlier that month. They were just really becoming more and more confident. And then the shortage ended and everyone was like, what's next?

3:57I'm David Gurra, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, how HIMSS became the king of knockoff weight loss drugs, and what's next for the company if it can't hold on to the crown.

4:13Bloomberg's Madison Muller started paying closer attention to HIMSS last spring, when the company started selling its own copycat versions of sought-after weight loss shots. She interviewed the CEO of the company, Andrew Dudum, shortly after it entered the market for GLP-1 drugs. And so that was May 2024. I went and met the CEO at a hotel here in New York, And he talked about how the company had plans and big ambitions to get into this big GLP-1 market. And one thing Madison wanted to ask Andrew was what had taken him so long. Honestly, when I sat down with the CEO, I was like, why didn't you do this sooner?

4:50By the time that they got into this market in May 2024, there were lots of other telehealth companies that were already doing this. And like for them, it made sense. It's like sell a popular drug at a discount. That's what they were known for. And he said that they had been sort of watching the evolution of this market evolve, and they wanted to make sure that they had enough supply secured, because they were just expecting these things to immediately be extremely popular. Companies like Novo Nordisk, which manufactures Ozempic and Wegovi, and Eli Lilly, which makes Munjaro and Zepbound, have been struggling to keep up with the demand for their drugs.

5:25And patients trying to get them through their doctors faced long wait times and high costs, sometimes$1 ,000 or more a month for shots. When HIMSS announced its compounded version, it priced it at$199 a month. And the company's pitch to consumers that you could access their version simply through filling out their clinical intake form online and consulting with a doctor seemed to be paying off. The company doesn't disclose its GLP-1 sales, but Morgan Stanley says that in the fourth quarter of 2024, the drugs made up 30 % of HIMSS's$481 million in revenue. HIMSS and other telehealth companies have relied on what are known as compounding pharmacies to make copies of popular drugs.

6:08Based on a doctor's recommendation, these pharmacies can also tailor dosages or ingredients for individual patients who aren't able to use a commercially available product. But what set HIMSS apart from its rivals is that when the company announced it would start offering GLP-1s, it had a leg up. It already owned two of its own compounding pharmacies. Madison went to see one in Ohio. It's a giant warehouse with a bunch of pharmacists and different people doing fulfillment, making some of the compounded drugs like their gummies in, like, hazmat suits in the back area. Madison says owning these compounding pharmacies is key to HIMSS's ability to sell compounded medications at a deep discount.

6:49So the drug makers, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, obviously set their list prices. for the medications, which they argue takes into account all of the R &D, the money that's spent going into developing these drugs, which for both companies, you know, they've been sort of several decades in the making. They also have these very sophisticated injector pens that are patented that patients use to inject the medications, whereas compounding pharmacies mix the drugs up themselves from active ingredients, and they don't have those sophisticated injector pens. The drugs HIMSS cells are a vial with a syringe that you drop and inject yourself.

7:27They aren't approved by the FDA. They don't need to be tested for safety and efficacy in the same way. And so they're able to price them a lot cheaper. In February of this year, HIMSS aired an ad during the Super Bowl and prepared for sales to keep rising. This system wasn't built to help us. It was built to keep us sick and stuck. But not anymore. HIMSS and HERS offers life-changing weight loss medications. But then, just a week after it aired, the FDA announced the GLP-1 shortage was over. So how did that affect HIMSS's strategy? And what could it mean for its future? We'll get into that after the break.

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9:46In February 2025, the FDA announced that the GLP-1 shortage was over. That meant compounding pharmacies were no longer allowed to make exact copies of wildly popular weight loss drugs. Bloomberg's Madison Muller says that meant HIMSS had to refine its strategy. Investors were questioning whether there was an opportunity for them going forward. And HIMSS was just sort of maintaining that there was, and, you know, investors would kind of have to trust them, and they would be able to do it. And Madison says HIMSS had two cards to play. The first was leaning into what's known as personalization. So the FDA allows pharmacies to personalize drugs for individual patients when their doctor says commercially available medicines won't meet their needs.

10:29So what that means is selling them at lower doses, adding other ingredients like vitamins or whatever, because that makes them different enough from the drugs that are commercially available that they're technically still allowed to sell them. So a lot of telehealth companies, including HIMSS, have continued to do that after the shortages ended, and that's allowed them to continue selling the drugs. And HIMSS's other play this year was to partner with other companies. In April, HIMSS announced a partnership with Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovi. Under the terms of the deal, HIMSS would be able to sell Wegovi at a discount, and Novo Nordisk would get to offer its drugs through HIMSS's popular platform.

11:06That was, I think, a surprise to everyone when Novo Nordisk and HIMSS announced that they had struck this partnership deal. Because Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly both have been really strong in their statements about companies that sell compounded drugs. They are not supportive of it. They don't think that it should be happening, especially after the shortages are over. They are filing lawsuits, taking legal action against compounding pharmacies, telehealth firms that are selling these compounded drugs. And so for them to come out and then partner with one of the biggest offenders was, I think, a surprise to everyone.

11:44And it seemed like a very unlikely partnership from the beginning. But that unlikely partnership between HIMSS and Novo Nordisk didn't last long. There were sort of signs that it had gotten off to a rocky start almost immediately. Just with the different press releases the companies were sending out, the ways that they were talking about this arrangement, calling it a partnership versus just sort of calling it like a deal. There were signs that things were not as they were made out to be. And then less than two months later, it all sort of spectacularly fell apart very abruptly. Novo Nordisk came out with an early morning press release saying that they were terminating the partnership.

12:26The HIMSS CEO was on vacation with his family in Maui, and it wasn't until hours later that they ended up, they didn't even issue a press release. He just came out on Twitter and said something and then was doing media interviews about it. So the whole thing was very dramatic and ended very abruptly. So where does that leave HIMSS? Without that partnership, Madison says, investors have started to question whether the company can still hit sales targets. In HIMSS's latest earnings report, it fell short of Wall Street estimates. They're not able to do what they once were, and so that continues to be a question of how is the company going to handle this, and what's next, and do they have another product that can sort of replace the blockbuster sales potential that they had from GLP-1s?

13:13At this moment, what is the company's attitude toward making these drugs? Are they confident that this effort to personalize them is going to make it so they can keep doing it without any legal backlash? They're extremely confident in that. They're not alone in that. There are other compounding pharmacies, sort of like the trade groups for compounding pharmacies also believe that this is a valid and legal way to keep making these drugs. But Madison says the drug companies that develop these treatments disagree. Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly do not think that. And that was part of the reason why Novo ended its partnership with HIMSS was because they said, you know, we sort of had this maybe not official agreement, but thought or belief that they would sort of wind down their compounding operations, and they didn't.

14:00They were continuing to market them, and Novo was not happy with that. And so there is this split right now between people who believe that this is perfectly legal and moral and that patients should have these alternate options to the drugs that cost less or widely available. And then you have the drug makers and you have a lot of doctors who are like, we can't have this explosion of essentially unregulated medicines and all of these other considerations. Like, there needs to be a nuanced conversation about it. Even as existential questions hang over HIMSS's future, Madison says the impact of the telehealth company and others like it have changed the market for pharmaceuticals.

14:41These telehealth companies, for all of the complaints about them, they have made these drugs more accessible. And that is something you cannot deny. I mean, the drug makers themselves are literally trying to emulate what these telehealth companies have done. Lilly has set up Lilly Direct. Novo Nordisk now has its own direct-to-consumer offering. And they see that there are patients who want an easy option to get these medications and sort of trying to meet these patients where they're at, which is oftentimes online. But they may not be meeting them fast enough. Novo Nordisk's second quarter earnings showed the smallest growth in sales since 2021.

15:19Madison says that part of that slowdown can be attributed to patients in the U.S. turning to copycat drugs from compounding pharmacies. And Denmark-based Novo Nordisk is losing ground to its U.S. rival, Eli Lilly, whose GLP-1 drugs have been shown to be more powerful. But Eli Lilly's performance has also disappointed investors. The company had developed a new weight loss pill with the hopes it could reach even more customers. But study results released in early August indicated that that pill wasn't as effective as Wall Street had hoped. On the day those results were made public, Eli Lilly's share price fell by more than 14 % in New York, its biggest single-day drop in 25 years.

15:59And Madison says whether HIMSS will remain a player in the market is a matter of intense and polarizing speculation. I've talked to analysts who say they've never seen a debate like this over a company that they cover, especially in health care, that there's just two very different sides. There is a split over whether this is a disruptive genius company or whether this company is just doing something that pushes the boundaries too far. And then you do have some people in the middle who are like, the weight loss debate is overshadowing everything else that this company is doing. And the fact that they have been very successful in ED and hair loss and that they are a profitable telehealth company and the biggest telehealth company and sort of like setting the stage for the rest of them.

16:46And then they've set this roadmap for the next few years, what they hope to achieve. They want to expand globally. They're hiring like crazy. They're taking people from Uber and all of these other Silicon Valley companies and sort of bringing them into him. So what's going to happen there? You know, will the company be able to grow in the way that it's wanting to and sort of laying out for people? It's, I mean, it's going to be an interesting story to follow, I think, for the next couple of years because they've so publicly made all of these declarations of what they hope to achieve. And we can sort of use those as benchmarks to see what happens.

17:28This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. The show is hosted by me, Sarah Holder, Juan Ha, and Saleha Mosen. Aaron Edwards, David Fox, Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patty Hirsch, Rachel Lewis-Kriskie, Naomi Ng, Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Segura, Julia Weaver, Yang Yang, and Taka Yasuzawa make the show. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back on Monday.

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