How to lose $ 8 billion with Twitter - the story of one failure

It is this drug that influenced the attitude of investors towards Novo Nordisk.

On Monday, a conference was held in New Orleans under the auspices of the American Diabetes Association (American Diabetes Association, ADA). At this event, representatives of the organization spoke about the results of their work. A new drug has also been announced. It was developed for several years, and the work was carried out in conditions of strict secrecy.

It was decided to present this drug at the conference, to which thousands of participants were invited. The most interesting thing is that all these people were asked not to photograph the data shown on the screens and not to share what they heard on social networks. As expected, it did not work.

As for the medicine, this is a new version of Victoza, the developer of which is the Danish company Novo Nordisk. Data on the effectiveness of the drug were shown at the conference before the official release and release of the drug on the market. Usually this information is shown to a narrow circle of the elect, which includes journalists. But these few promise to keep a series of data secret, under the threat of losing access to information about future discoveries.
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Now the conference organizers have decided for some reason to do differently. Please do not photograph anything had the opposite effect. Already a few minutes after the display in the lobby of information on the effectiveness of the drug on the web photos appeared with this data. The effectiveness of Victoza is about 13%, this drug reduces the number of strokes and heart attacks in diabetics, although there are contraindications. This medicine can be called effective, but after the data were publicized, investors thought differently.

After all these photos appeared on the Web, with key information, the conference organizers began asking users to remove the posted photos.

@cristinatejerap you can post slides. Please delete. Thank you.

- Amer. Diabetes Assn. (@AmDiabetesAssn) June 14, 2016

But it was too late. Many messages have spread across the web, retweets allow you to disseminate information with great speed. One of the accounts retweeted photos from the conference for all of its 18,000 subscribers.

Effects

After all this was seen by investors, the company's shares immediately collapsed. The cost of the share in just a few hours fell immediately by 5.6%. It seems that it is not too much, but for a billionaire company it is a lot of money. The fall of the shares provoked a decrease in the company's capitalization by $ 7.77 billion. Most interesting is that the conference organizers were warned about the danger of a leak, but did nothing to prevent this from happening.

Investors of the company hoped that the effectiveness of the drug would be 15% or higher - this was the figure that Novo Nordisk representatives called last year. And since it was not possible to achieve the stated indicators , this was perceived almost as a global failure.

In general, this situation did not happen for the first time. But it seems that what has happened little teaches other companies. But to keep the secret is quite simple - you just do not need to tell anyone. Or tell, but only to those you trust. And certainly not sharing secret information in front of a crowd of a couple of thousand people. In this case, neither Wi-Fi disconnection, nor a request not to take electronic devices with you will help someone to break the ban or request.