After quite a crushing bull stampede in 2024, the stock price of weight loss drug star Novo Nordisk (NVO -1.54%) has come down considerably. But I think that not only will the Wegovy maker recover, it'll zoom much higher in the coming years. Read on to find out why.

Widened waistlines

If you could flag only one type of medication that's perfectly targeted to the huge U.S. market, it would be weight loss drugs.

Obesity is an American problem that's not getting better; according to research published in The Lancet medical journal and cited by U.S. News and World Report, the obesity rate here more than doubled in percentage terms from 1990 to 2022. In the former year, slightly over 21% of U.S. adults were obese. Thirty-two years later, that figure was nearly 44%.

And that's just in the U.S. -- obesity affected more than 1 billion people worldwide in 2022. So it's no surprise to learn that analysts are expecting sales of weight loss drugs to balloon. In 2024, this tally exceeded $30 billion worldwide for the first time.

And that's peanuts. In May of last year, investment bank Morgan Stanley adjusted its forecast for 2030 sales from $77 billion to at least $105 billion, and perhaps as much as $144 billion. At the very least, that's a potentially more than threefold increase in the space of barely over half a decade.

Staying in the game

Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly (with its Zepbound) are the two reigning kings on the U.S. market these days. There will be more contenders; Viking Therapeutics, in particular, is in the later stages of developing a treatment that's performed well in trials.

But especially in big jurisdictions like the U.S. and the European Union, it takes time to get a medicine approved. Meanwhile, Wegovy has become the go-to drug for obesity treatment, and incumbency has power in the pharmaceutical world. Even if Novo Nordisk loses considerable share to a giant like Eli Lilly and/or an upstart, it should still have a significant piece of a rapidly enlarging pie.