Apotex Video
Video Transcript
For over thirty years Apotex has met the challenges of tomorrow, and fought hard to build a successful worldwide pharmaceutical company. Through a strategy of vertical integration, Apotex has built an exceptional scientific and manufacturing base that supports a global sales and marketing infrastructure. Apotex is focused on meeting the world's long term need for quality affordable medicines. We have built the facilities, the scientific R&D base, and the technology to meet the health care needs of the world for today and tomorrow. A dedicated Apotex International sales and marketing team will ensure customer needs are met with medicines that are sold in over one hundred and fifteen countries.
In 1974, born out of entrepreneurial efforts and strong scientific roots, and with just two employees, our chairman had a vision for our success and growth. Today, his vision realized, Apotex is a global leader in providing affordable quality health care. As the largest Canadian owned pharmaceutical company, with over 5000 employees in Canada, and over 6500 worldwide. The Apotex group of companies has a simple, yet powerful mission - "To build one of the world's most successful independent pharmaceutical companies in R&D, Quality, Manufacturing, Sales, and Customer Service." The Apotex group of companies occupies over 325,000 square meters of facilities with state of the art technology to meet the needs of the world's health care system.
Apotex has the capacity to produce twenty billion dosages per year. We have invested in our future with a planned Research and Development program that will spend billions of dollars within the next ten years. Presently, we produce over 260 medicines in over 4000 formats and dosages. Our R&D program is supported by close to 2000 scientific staff, including 110 PhDs, and has well over 600 products under development, from solid dosage and injectables to aerosols and biopharmaceuticals across all technology platforms. This is accomplished through advanced capabilities in the development of APIs (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients) and finished dosage formulations.
The innovative research arm of Apotex is ApoPharma, Inc, which has developed medicines such as Ferriprox for the treatment of thalassaemia. Other new compounds are in pre-clinical development. Research in new biotech medicines is carried out by Cangene, with products like WinRho SCF, and other immunoglobins, as well as novel recombinant products. The Apotex group and our facilities are recognized around the world as among the best. This has resulted in approvals by many health agencies around the world, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Canadian Therapeutics Products Directorate, the European Medicines Evaluation Agency, and the Australian Therapeutics Goods Administration. These approvals are the base upon which we have been able to build our international business.
Regulatory Requirements in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Australia require that all generic products meet rigorous standards for bioequivalence. Testing standards used in Canada are recognized as amongst the most stringent in the world. All Apotex products meet these standards, ensuring that the fundamental cornerstone of bioequivalence to the brand reference standard is achieved.
Apotex is the number one supplier of generic pharmaceuticals in Canada, filling more than seventy million prescriptions per year. We have achieved this success through a strategy of differentiation in a highly competitive market. This differentiation is based upon providing superior service and developing professional value added programs for both pharmacists and their patients, which are recognized as the best in the health care marketplace. This experience has been used to establish successful partnerships in many markets worldwide.
Now let's have a quick tour of the Apotex group. We'll start at our Headquarters area where we have eleven facilities, including leading edge high tech manufacturing and clinical facilities. Expansions have occurred regularly over the last eight years. The new manufacturing facilities were built on the concept of using gravity to assist in the production process. Automated guided vehicles, or AGVs, do all the heavy work. Production moves from floor to floor in what is one of the most technologically advanced facilities in the world. Apotex's most recent major expansion at our Etobicoke facility was recognized as one of the five best pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities in the world by the International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineers. Also, one of the key components at the head office campus are multi-million dollar laboratories in every size to house the hundreds of ongoing R&D projects currently underway at Apotex.
The Biomedical Research Group includes a clinical facility housing one hundred and four beds. Here, the studies can be done for generic pharmaceuticals and the early phases of new, innovative medicines, a feature unique to Apotex. The head office area has separate specialty production facilities for the manufacture of antibiotics and cytotoxic products.
Apotex's Richmond Hill facility manufactures liquids – ophthalmics, nasal sprays, and injectables. This high tech facility uses innovative technology to manufacture its products.
Apotex PharmaChem in Brantford, Ontario, manufactures almost half of the fine chemical requirements for the Apotex group of companies. PharmaChem researches and develops fine chemicals to meet our objective to be vertically integrated. The facility has recently gone through a major expansion to continue to meet our growing business demands. This ability to manufacture our own active ingredients when required is a key strength for Apotex.
Also supplying fine chemicals to the group is Apotex Fermentation in Winnipeg. It has state of the art laboratories and fermentation facilities for products such as cholesterol reducing drugs like Pravastatin and Simvastatin. The Apotex group of companies includes Cangene, which focuses on the strategic and innovative area of biotechnology. With facilities in Canada and the U.S, Cangene is one of the most successful biotechnology companies in the world.
Our true strength is our employees and our vision. From the top down, we are an organization dedicated to serving the needs of our customers, and our employees know that putting the needs of our customers first will help Apotex to achieve our vision of being a world leader in generic pharmaceuticals.
Given our company goal to make pharmaceuticals affordable all over the world, Apotex continues to donate generously through the Apotex Foundation to global charitable causes and institutions of higher learning. We are also proud to say that we have donated medicines to every disaster and war zone around the globe. The world has a tremendous need for quality affordable medicines.
Over the last twenty years we have built a global network in over one hundred and fifteen countries. This network consists of distributors and subsidiaries in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Australasia. As you can see, during our thirty year history, we have built a tremendous presence in generic pharmaceuticals, and we look forward to the next thirty years of growth and service to our customers.
In the future we will continue to be recognized as a global leader in generic pharmaceuticals. We will maintain this by expanding our presence in our existing international markets, as well as entering new ones. To do this, we will build long term sales partnerships where the customer gets what they want when they need it. It will be built on the foundation of reliability of the supply chain, the speed of product development, and hundreds of products to meet the needs of your health care system. We are proud to say, "At Apotex, our innovation does not end in the lab, it just starts there."