By Henok Reta
The United Arab Emirate (UAE) -based Gulf Pharmaceutical Industries a.k.a. Julphar announced that it would build the continent’s largest injectable medicine producing facility in Ethiopia with an investment outlay of USD 50 million.
Hassan Jibreel (Eng.), senior director of corporate development for the company, told The Reporter last Wednesday that Julphar has found Ethiopia to be the hub of Africa and a center for many other international organizations. Actually, what the company is thinking of doing is an expansion project. In fact, Julphar started operations in Ethiopia in 2012 after building a pharmaceutical plant in Addis Ababa around Jackross area with a capital outlay of USD 9.17 million. The factory became operation in 2013 producing assortments of pharmaceuticals.
“At the beginning, it was like coming into a black box for us to move on such a big investment in Ethiopia. But, it turned out to be very different,” he explained.
Back then, it was the first manufacturing plant that Julphar opened outside of the UAE.
According to him, the second phase of this expansion project mainly consists of injectable medicine producing plants and warehouse facilities which can be considered to be the largest for the company outside of the UAE and the biggest of its kind in Africa. “We have already secured 11,000 sqm plot of land in Addis Ababa to start manufacturing by the end of 2015,” he said.
The injectable plant is expected to fill the demand for insulin for patients with diabetes across the country and the African continent in the process promoting the country and the company altogether. On the other hand, the company has expressed its desire to carry out a number of conferences and workshop in order to assist local pharmaceutical manufacturers.
“We feel the local manufacturers really lack up-to-date knowledge in the area; so we want to focus on building up capacity through Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and that is why we want to organize workshops to share our experience in that regard,” he said.
Collaborating with the Ethiopian Pharmaceutical Associations (EPA) and other partners, Julphar organized a two-day workshop to impart standard manufacturing practices to the local industries at Elilly International Hotel this week (Wednesday and Thursday) . The workshop emphasized on basic pharmaceutical manufacturing practices and equipment specialized in granulation process and tablet coating. “To realize its vision and mission, EPA is proactively forging strategic partnerships with key stakeholders and EPA is happy to have Julphar Ethiopia as one of its strategic partners,” Teferi Gedif (MPH, PhD), president of EPA, said on the occasion. The implementation of GMP is an investment in good quality medicine that will improve the health of individual patients and the community, while at the same time benefiting the pharmaceutical industry and the health professionals, he states.
Julphar first got a taste of the Ethiopian market in 2002 as it joined the market as a supplier partnering with Medtech Ethiopia, a local distributor.
Source: The Reporter
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