Philab Holdings Corp.’s unit Philab Industries Inc. said on Wednesday that it has signed a deal with multinational company Industria Macchine Automatiche S.p.A (IMA) to distribute in the Philippines automated machineries that process and package pharmaceutical products.
Established in 1961, IMA S.p.A is a Bologna, Italy-based firm that designs and manufactures automatic machines for the processing and packaging of pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, food, tobacco, tea and coffee.
Philab is the exclusive distributor of IMA pharmaceutical machines. It has already sold several units to Pascual Labs and Amherst Laboratories Inc. (Unilab) since the partnership started, the company said.
It has further acquired the license to distribute IMA Group’s pharma equipment, which completes Philab Industries’s health-care line.
“It is important for our big pharma companies to use high-technology equipment in producing a large quantity of quality and consistent tablets and capsules to offer the Philippine market. This is where the expertise of IMA comes in, with more than 50 years of reputation in the global pharma industry,” the company said. “Philab pursued this partnership to successfully satisfy the rising demands of the pharma industry.”
For the first half of 2017, IMA reported total revenue of €654.6 million.
“We have selected Philab to be the sole distributor of our equipment because of their remarkable performance and reputation for the past 59 years. We are hopeful that Philab would effectively capture the needs of the Philippine market,” Maurizio Ferretti, Managing Director of IMA Pacific Co. Ltd., said.
IMA also invests in drug research and development, which helps the multinational company discover health-care trends, successfully design and produce automated machines fit for the different requirements of the pharmaceutical market.
According to the World Health Organization, the pharmaceutical market is in constant growth and is expected to reach €1.3 trillion in 2019. Likewise, the Philippine pharmaceutical market stood as the third-largest pharmaceutical market in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations region following Indonesia and Thailand, and is expected to reach 4.1 billion US dollars by 2020 based on a report by GlobalData.
