Coloplast, the cod skin and the price someone else sets

Friday, 7 July 2023, the start of a Danish summer weekend. Coloplast, the Danish maker of stoma bags and catheters, agrees to pay up to $1.3bn for Kerecis, a company in Ísafjörður, Iceland, that heals wounds with cod skin. This column is about one mechanic: when someone else sets your price, your forecast is their decision, and you can read it before the room does.

The fish came with a promise: Kerecis sales would grow about 30 per cent a year for three years. Keep that sentence. Cod rarely arrive with a business plan.

This week I read Coloplast's results with a pencil. On 2 November it cut the growth it aims for every year to 2030, partly because America changed how it pays for products like these.

So how does a fish promised so much end up at zero? Hold on.

Kerecis makes fish-skin grafts that doctors lay on wounds that will not heal, and in 2025 Coloplast said it would “create an innovation leader”. It may be the only Danish acquisition that could be served with boiled potatoes.

On 4 November 2025 the interim chief executive, Lars Rasmussen, signed the full-year report. Page 7 said the Kerecis business case, fast growth and a healthy profit by the year just ended, “remains on track”.

Then January arrived.

Most companies set their own prices, so their forecast is their own guess. When the government pays, the government sets the price, and one rule can change it. So before you trust a growth promise, ask who sets the price, and read what that payer has already said.

America's Medicare had already said it: from 1 January 2026, one fixed payment for all such products instead of the old prices. About a fifth of Kerecis sales came from outpatient care that Medicare pays for.

It was on page 13 of the same report, six pages after “on track”. The price had the better argument.

Coloplast cut the Kerecis forecast in February, and in May cut it again, to “0% growth” for the year. Its profit margin, the share of each sale kept as profit, was put at around zero too.

In August the next report wrote down DKK 3bn ($450mn) of the price Coloplast paid, meaning Kerecis is now valued below what it cost. A write-down is a receipt with an apology stapled to it.

Here is the cold part.

The report that printed the new price had also forecast Kerecis growth of around 25 per cent. In the last quarter Biologics, the unit that holds Kerecis, shrank instead. The forecast and the fine print sat one page apart; the fine print won.

Nobody is accused of anything; every number was published. In fairness, Gavin Wood, chief executive only since 1 May 2026, inherited the promise and reset the ambition within his first year.

Right of reply: Coloplast had not been asked for comment before publication on 7 November 2026. Any response will be added here, with the date it arrived.

The people who use these grafts, and those who make them in Ísafjörður, did their part. The shortfall sat in the forecast, not the factory.

Three signals for your own company: growth that leans on one big payer; that payer's new rule, printed deep in the report; and the words “on track” in the same report.

My verdict: Coloplast promised growth whose price was set in Washington, and Washington changed it. The new rule sat in the very report that called the promise on track.

Cod skin can mend a wound. It cannot mend a price somebody else has set.

Keep that sentence, I said: about 30 per cent a year. Coloplast kept it until February, which is the trouble with a sentence someone else gets to finish.

Coloplast says Biologics will grow again from the second quarter of its new year. Its spring report is in my diary. Tomorrow: Ford, and the two cents of every dollar that went missing.

Law No. 16 · Build Growth That Needs No Permission

Understand Business. Better.
Max Noble