Taipei Times: Construction on ScinoPharm's (
Jo Shen (
But from the time we moved in, at the end of 1999, until now, we have already finished an administration building, an R&D building, all of our utilities supplies and a warehouse.
At the backside of the R&D building we also built several small manufacturing areas. In all, we're going to build seven manufacturing areas. At this point, we have three built.
The manufacturing capacity represented by those three areas built last year is only 5 percent of the total capacity that we eventually will have. The fourth plant will be ready in May, and we have another three plants in a large production building which are under construction. Every two to three months, another one will come online. Two of the seven areas we have two lines, so we will have a total of nine lines.
TT: Are you already making sales?
Shen: We have not finished our plant construction. We only have our small manufacturing suites, which give us the possibility to provide our customers with samples.
By the way, those samples are very expensive. Some of them are sold at US$10,000 to US$150,000 a kilo. But there is this particular product, which has more than one customer, I should say three customers, who are willing to pay half a million [US] dollars per kilo for as much as we can give them. These customers are chasing us and want us to give them a commitment date. Our three little manufacturing areas are running around the clock [just] to keep up the demand of sample from our customers.
Construction has been coming along according to schedule, and there has been no delay. We intentionally put the large production bays later on the schedule because the customers cannot use our large bay until later, after they get their drug approved.
TT: How does that work?
Shen: They have to formulate their products with our product. So we have to produce our product in a small quantity to give to them to formulate, and then it goes to the FDA (United States Food and Drug Administration) for approval.
Actually, we built the large building for three major lines and one of the lines will be completed sooner than intended. The reason being the brand companies are looking for someplace to manufacture their products -- there's a shortage of active pharmaceutical ingredient capacity meeting their standards -- but they want to see the plant built before outsourcing their products to us. So, we have to make our investment first.
It's very difficult for people in other businesses to understand our business, and especially the uncontrollable part, which is the timing of FDA inspection and approval. In our business, it takes a long time to get started. But once you're in the business, it's very good. Unless you really botch up, you're not going to lose any sales easily and the product lifecycle is almost forever. Just think about Tylenol and Aspirin, they've been on the market for a long time.
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