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Shares in Hims & Hers Health, Inc. (NYSE: HIMS) are skyrocketing in early-morning trading today after the telehealth company announced a new partnership with the Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk. That partnership will see Hims & Hers offer Novo Nordisks weight-loss drug Wegovy through its platform. Heres what you need to know. Hims & Hers will offer weight-loss drug Wegovy Hims & Hers Health announced today that it has entered into a long-term collaboration with Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk to offer its popular weight-loss drug Wegovy to its users through the Hims & Hers platform. The news sent HIMS shares soaring in early-morning trading. Novo Nordisk is the maker of the Wegovy weight-loss drug. The popular GLP-1 drug is often prescribed for those who wish to manage their obesity and lose weight. In recent years, people who have struggled to lose weight via traditional diet and exercise regimens have increasingly turned to GLP-1 medications. The collaboration between Hims & Hers and Novo Nordisk will see the telehealth companys platform integrated with Novo Nordisks NovoCare Pharmacy, allowing Hims & Hers users to acquire all dose strengths of the Wegovy weight loss drug. The aim of the partnership is to blend Hims & Hers’s holistic telehealth offering with proven weight-loss medication and to offer the drug to self-paying patients. Hims & Hers says that the medication, along with a required Hims & Hers membership, will be offered to users for $599 per month. It will begin offering the drug this week. HIMS stock surges Shortly after Hims & Hers announced the Novo Nordisk Wegovy collaboration, HIMS stock surged in premarket trading this morning. As of the time of this writing, in early-morning trading, HIMS stock is currently up over 26% to over $36 per share. The stock surge suggests that investors see the Novo Nordisk collaboration as a potential major accelerator for Hims & Hers memberships that could lead to increased recurring monthly revenue. However, at around $36 per share, Hims & Hers stock price is still well below its all-time high of nearly $73 per share in February. That month, the company released its Q4 results and announced that it would stop offering compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient used in Wegovy and similar GLP-1 weight loss drugs, CNBC noted. In May 2024, Hims & Hers stock surged after it had been allowed to offer a compounded semaglutide due to a semaglutide shortage. But once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared that the shortage had resolved, Hims & Hers could no longer offer the compounded drug. HIMS stock sank 22% after that announcement in February, reported CNBC at the time. Its understandable, then, why HIMS shares are surging so much in trading today after the company announced once again that it would be able to offer a GLP-1 weight loss drugand not just a compounded version, but the brand-name version, Wegovy. With todays stock surge, HIMS shares are now up nearly 48% year-to-date. Over the past year, HIMS shares have now surged nearly 185%.
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E-Commerce
Major orders canceled. Containers of products left stranded overseas. No roadmap for what comes next.The Trump administration raised tariffs on goods from China to 145% in early April. Since then, small business owners who depend on imports from China to survive have become increasingly desperate as they eye dwindling inventory and skyrocketing invoices.President Donald Trump seemed to back down somewhat last week when he said he expected the tariffs to come down “substantially.” That helped set off a rally in the stock market. But for small businesses that operate on razor-thin margins, the back and forth is causing massive upheaval. Some say they could be just months from going out of business altogether. The Massachusetts family-owned game company Game makers are particularly susceptible to the tariffs since the majority of games and toys sold in the U.S. are made in China, according to The Toy Association.WS Game Co., based in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, is a family-owned business that licenses Hasbro board games like Monopoly, Candy Land and Scrabble and creates deluxe versions of them. Its most popular line of games come in boxes that look like vintage books and sell for $40.The company’s games were featured in Oprah’s Favorite Things list in 2024 and sold in 14,000 stores in North America, from big national chains to mom-and-pop stores, said owner Jonathan Silva, whose father founded the company in 2000.All of WS Game’s production is done in China. The tariffs have brought the past 25 years of healthy growth to a screeching halt.Over the past three weeks, WS Game has had three containers of finished games, worth $500,000, stranded in China. It lost orders from three of the largest U.S. retailers totaling $16 million in business. And there’s not much Silva can do about it. “As a small business, we don’t have the runway or the capabilities to move manufacturing on a whim,” said Silva, who has 22 employees. He said the tariffs have “disrupted our business and put us on the verge of insolvency” and estimates he has about a four-month runway to stay afloat if nothing changes.“We’re really hoping that cooler heads prevail,” he said. Artificial flowers in Kentucky Jeremy Rice co-owns House, a home-décor shop in Lexington, Kentucky, that specializes in artificial flower arrangements for the home. About 90% of the flowers his business uses are made in China.Rice uses dozens of vendors. The largest are absorbing some of the cost of the tariffs and passing on the rest. One vendor is raising prices by 20% and another 25%. But Rice is expecting smaller vendors to increase prices by much higher percentages.House offers mid-range artificial flowers. A large hydrangea head will retail for $10 to $16, for example. China is the only place that manufacturers higher quality silk flowers. It would take a vendor years to open a factory in a different country or move production somewhere else, Rice said.Rice ordered his holiday décor early this year. But even after stocking up ahead of the tariffs, he only has enough everyday floral inventory in to last two to three months.“After that, I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said.Rice is concerned that the trade war will wipe out a bunch of mom-and-pop stores, similar to what happened in the Great Recession and the pandemic.“There’s nowhere to turn, there’s nothing to do,” he said. Tea in Michigan A tea shop in a Michigan college town is also caught in the middle of the ongoing tariff fight.“It’s basically just put a big pit in my stomach,” said Lisa McDonald, owner of TeaHaus, located in Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan. McDonald has owned TeaHaus for nearly 18 years and sells tea to customers across the U.S.Americans drank about 86 billion servings of tea in 2024, according to the Tea Association of the U.S.A.. Almost all of that is imported since tea isn’t grown in the U.S. at scale, due to factors ranging from climate to cost.McDonald imports loose-leaf tea from China, India, Kenya, Sri Lanka, and other countries. She says her customer base is “from all over the U.S. and the world.” But she worries there is a limit to what they’ll spend. Her premium teas can cost up to $33 for a 50-gram bag.“I don’t think I can charge $75 for a 50-gram bag of tea, no matter how amazing that tea is,” she said.McDonald understands Trump’s rationale for wanting to use tariffs to spur U.S. manufacturing but says it doesn’t apply to the tea industry.“We can’t grow tea in the U.S. to the extent that we need. We can’t just flip the industry and ‘make tea great again’ in America. It just can’t happen,” she said. Car accessories in Oklahoma Jim Umlauf’s business, 4Knines, based in Oklahoma City, makes vehicle seat covers and cargo liners for dog owners and others. To do so, he needs raw materials such as fabric, coatings and components from China.Umlauf has explored manufacturing in countries other than China since 2018, when Trump first instituted a 25% tariff on goods from China, but has run into complications. In the meantime, 4Knines absorbs the extra cost, which Umlauf says has limited its growth and squeezed its margins.Now, the new tariffs make it nearly impossible to do business. The demand is there, but the company can’t afford to bring over more products.“We only have a limited amount of inventory left, and without some relief, we’ll run out soon,” Umlauf said.As a small business owner who has worked hard to develop a high-quality brand, create jobs and contribute to the community, Umlauf is frustrated. He has tried to contact the White House and other decision-makers to ask for small business support. But he’s gotten zero response.“It’s time for policymakers to consider the full impact of trade policies not just on stock prices or global competitiveness, but on the real people running small businesses,” he said. AP videojournalist Mike Householder in Detroit contributed to this report. Mae Anderson, AP Business Writer
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E-Commerce
Its been more than half a century since it became more common to ship freight in trucks than by train. But when one company decided to start selling its product in the New York City market, it built its own new rail terminal to avoid the cost and emissions of trucking. A truck is not an efficient way to take these types of materials long distance, says Grant Quasha, CEO of Eco Material Technologies. The company makes supplementary cementitious material or SCM, a component added to concrete to make it stronger and longer-lasting. The material is made from fly ash, a type of waste produced from coal plants that the company sources from landfills at locations throughout the country. A truck can hold 20 tons of it; a train, which can move as much as 2,000 tons, cuts emissions by at least 90%, Quasha says. The company wanted to serve the construction market in New York from one of its sites in rural Pennsylvania, as well as another site in Georgia. But since trucking would be cost-prohibitive and more polluting, they turned to the more old-fashioned solution of rail. First, they had to find rail lines that were still in use in the right location. We had to scour the area to find existing infrastructure that could work with our needs, Quasha says. They partnered with a local short-line railroad that owned a rail yard in Queens, not far from the companys concrete customers. Then they built a terminal in the rail yard that would work for their specific needs. Extra train tracks at the terminal allow them to store their product in train cars until its needed. [Photo: New York & Atlantic Railway Co.] The logistics are complicated. To make a delivery from one of the companys sites, in Pennsylvania, the train cant go straight there. There isnt a bridge or tunnel to accommodate a train to Queens, although a long-planned freight tunnel is under construction. After a train reaches New Jersey, the train cars go on a specialized barge with built-in train tracks. A tugboat pushes the barge across the Hudson and East Rivers, and then another locomotive picks up the train cars in Brooklyn. Right now, using this type of material in New York City usually means importing it from countries like Turkey and China. But it makes more sense, environmentally, for it to come from a place like Pennsylvania instead, Quasha says. (It also can avoid tariffs and crowded ports.) Over the last century, coal companies have sent billions of tons of waste to landfills, which Eco Material Technologies reprocesses for use in concrete. It also has the dual benefit of helping clean up the old dumps. When it’s used in concrete, it reduces the need for cement, which has a large carbon footprint. It makes the final concrete stronger, and less expensive. “People say, if these materials are cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and make better concrete, why aren’t they used all the time?” Quasha says. “The answer is supply: Historically, there hasn’t been enough of the material where you need when you need it. You don’t generally have these waste dumps next to midtown Manhattan.” At the new terminal, where deliveries have already started, the company plans to bring in around 50,000 tons of the product each year, on roughly 10 train cars each week.
Category:
E-Commerce
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