Novo Holdings' real portfolio grew 9.2% while headline AUM fell 35%

Novo Holdings had a rough 2025, and its CEO is not pretending otherwise.

The Copenhagen-based investment company — which controls the wealth behind Novo Nordisk and the Novo Nordisk Foundation — saw assets under management fall roughly 35% last year, from EUR 142 billion to EUR 93 billion. The culprit: the decline in Novo Nordisk share price and a dollar that lost more than 11% against the Danish krone. Those are not investing setbacks; they are currency and market valuation effects that hit the denominator of what Novo Holdings manages.

But here is the part that gets lost in the headline number: the actual investment portfolio grew. Novo Holdings Investment Portfolio increased from EUR 29 billion to EUR 30 billion, and posted a 9.2% return in constant exchange rates — outperforming benchmarks despite a market that, as CEO Kasim Kutay put it, was heavily concentrated on technology and artificial intelligence, according to Novo Holdings' 2025 annual results announcement.

The 35% drop in AUM is real, but it is misleading as a signal of what Novo Holdings is doing with its capital. The company deployed DKK 13 billion (roughly EUR 1.8 billion) into life sciences in 2025, adding 12 new companies to its portfolio while exiting 36. That is a net reduction in count, reflecting a year where exits and asset management mattered more than new acquisitions — a cautious posture Kutay attributed to early-year volatility.

Geopolitics is clearly what keeps Kutay up at night. His statement in the annual results cited fundamental shifts within geopolitics, technology, and the global investment environment as the defining challenge. The specific China angle in the Endpoints interview — which appears to have been the genesis of this story — likely touched on how Novo Holdings navigates investment in a world where US-China tensions complicate cross-border dealmaking. The press release does not address China directly, but it does note the company strengthened its Asia presence by establishing an operation in Mumbai. That is India, not China — a deliberate geographic diversification, perhaps, in a region where concentration risk has become a liability.

The broader context is that Novo Holdings is the financial engine behind the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which in turn owns the majority of Novo Nordisk and Novonesis. When Novo Nordisk market cap slips — as it did dramatically in 2025 — the knock-on effect reshapes the entire foundation financial architecture. The company remains the controlling shareholder and the source of the dividend income that funds the foundation philanthropy.

What Kutay seems to be signaling is that the playbook for a foundation-backed investment vehicle needs to account for a world where the usual rules about currency, correlation, and geographic diversification do not work the way they used to. AUM may be down, but the investment slate is active, the portfolio is growing on a net basis, and the geopolitics are something you navigate rather than wait out.