PharmaSwiss plans Serbian plant
pharmafile | October 22, 2009 | News story | Manufacturing and Production | PharmaSwiss
PharmaSwiss is planning to build a brand new manufacturing unit in Belgrade, Serbia, to allow it to carry out end-to-end manufacturing in the country.
At the moment the company relies on importing semi-finished goods into Serbia that need to be packaged locally for sale in the Serbian neighbouring markets. The new plant will allow end-to-end manufacture of products, according to Goran Stojanovic, PharmaSwiss’ director of business development.
PharmaSwiss is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, and specialises in marketing products for research-based drugmakers in the smaller Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, as well as Greece, Turkey and Israel.
The facility, based in Belgrade, will be able to manufacture a broad range of product types, including tablets, capsules, sachets, dry suspensions and syrups, Stojanovic told Pharmafocus. It will take around two years to bring online and cost an estimated 20 million euros to construct.
The next phase for the company is focusing on an expansion into the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), he said, and the Belgrade unit will be a key part of that expansion, as well as helping to serve PharmaSwiss’ existing markets.
When running at full capacity the plant will be able to make 700 million tablets and capsules and 30 million finished packages every year. At the moment, PharmaSwiss’ Serbian production is around 9 million packs a year.
The company’s sales reached 132 million euros last year and it now employs 650 employees in 20 countries. Stojanovic said that the company currently holds a 12% share of the Serbian market, and the new plant will help it expand both “capacity and our technological base”.
The facility will rely heavily on automation, but will still employ 150-200 workers in areas such as quality control, monitoring and maintenance of equipment, when it is fully operational.
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