Oprah Winfrey mentioned she’s stepping down from her function at WeightWatchers after serving on its board of administrators for 9 years. She additionally pledged to donate her monetary stake within the weight-loss firm to the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition.
Winfrey’s announcement, issued late Wednesday, despatched shares of WeightWatchers right into a tailspin. The corporate’s inventory, which in 2021 topped $40, plunged 17% on Thursday to $3.18 in early morning buying and selling.
Winfrey becoming a member of WeightWatchers in 2015 gave the weight-loss firm a high-profile enhance, with its shares greater than doubling quickly after the deal was introduced. However lately, WeightWatchers and different weight-reduction plan corporations have struggled amid a shift towards so-called GLP-1 medicine like Ozempic, which depend on hormones to regulate urge for food and have helped folks shed further kilos.
The burden loss firm, which was based within the early Nineteen Sixties, has seen its monetary outcomes deteriorate lately. Its income in 2023 tumbled virtually 15% to $889.6 million from the earlier yr, whereas it misplaced $112 million.
Winfrey owns about 1.4% of the corporate’s shares, or about 1.3 million shares, in keeping with monetary knowledge supplier FactSet. At right this moment’s inventory value, that values her stake at about $4.1 million — a far cry from her preliminary funding of $43.2 million for six.4 million shares.
The media star’s determination comes after she disclosed final yr that she depends on these medicine to keep up her weight. Winfrey instructed Individuals journal in December that she “launched my very own disgrace about it” and went to a physician to get a prescription, though she did not disclose the identify of the treatment she depends on. Winfrey added, “I now use it as I really feel I would like it, as a software to handle not yo-yoing.”
WeightWatchers, formally named WW Worldwide, final yr moved into the prescription weight-loss drug enterprise by buying Sequence, a telehealth supplier that provides customers entry to GLP-1 medicine. It additionally debuted WeightWatchers GLP-1, a subscription program for folks utilizing that class of medicine.
In her assertion, Winfrey mentioned she’s going to proceed “to advise and collaborate with WeightWatchers and CEO Sima Sistani in elevating the dialog round recognizing weight problems as a power situation, working to scale back stigma and advocating for well being fairness.”
Winfrey mentioned she’s donating her shares in WeightWatchers to the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition, a Smithsonian establishment in Washington, D.C., as she’s been a long-time supporter of the group.
Within the assertion, WeightWatchers mentioned Winfrey’s determination to donate her shares is partly “to remove any perceived battle of curiosity round her taking weight reduction drugs.”
