Novo confident of strong drug pipeline and future growth- CEO

By Teis Jensen COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark's Novo Nordisk has a stronger development pipeline of new drug candidates than it has ever had before, and thinks it can keep delivering the strong sales growth of the past decade, its chief executive said on Tuesday. Novo has no long-term sales target, but it has a target for its operating profit to grow by 15 percent per year. "I believe we have never had as strong a pipeline as we have right now," chief executive Lars Rebien Sorensen said at the company's capital markets day in Hillerod near Copenhagen. In the third quarter Novo Nordisk had a market share of 27 percent of the global diabetes care market, which is worth around $42 billion per year.