Project Management Solutions for Pharmaceutical Developments

Q: How representative are the pharmaceutical and medical divisions for GRUPO SINOTEK’s operations?

A: When GRUPO SINOTEK started, we were solely dedicated to the purchase, revamping and sale of used equipment for the pharmaceutical industry. The amount of used equipment in the US made us dabble in this market to meet the needs of Mexican buyers, with GRUPO SINOTEK taking care of the transportation and maintenance of the equipment. From this experience, we began building a team of experts on pharmaceutical equipment companies in line with mechanical, electrical, software and  validation requirements. With a strong team – high-quality programmers have differentiated GRUPO SINOTEK from other companies – and after realizing the opportunity that Asian machinery manufacturers trying to enter the Mexican market, we began to team up to promote, sell and service their equipment.

GRUPO SINOTEK represents, among others, the Chinese International Machinery Association (CIMA) to standardize purchases of spare parts and build a stable equipment offering and local maintenance for such parts. This was a necessary step to secure our market penetration and growth.

We have worked with more than 450 pharmaceutical companies, sold 3,500 pieces of equipment and machinery representing sales of US$250 million. Moreover, GRUPO SINOTEK has allied with engineering companies to put together larger projects for our clients, including pharmaceutical companies in Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina and we are now expanding to Latin America. Despite working with other sectors, the pharmaceutical industry represents around 70 percent of our revenue.

The projects we put together for our customers take around 12 to 24 months so the capital turnover is slow. However, multisectoral and regional work has made our business model sustainable over time. Additionally, GRUPO SINOTEK has offices in China in charge of the quality management services we offer in the Americas. This has enabled us to understand complex scenarios, such as the isolation and containment systems for highly toxic products or biotechnological developments of monoclonal antibodies. This international experience has pushed us to search for customers in the Americas interested in bringing new technologies to their side of the world. In fact, we are working with a Chinese pharmaceutical company to transfer technology for COVID-19 vaccines that is interested in finding Latin American partners.

Q: What makes GRUPO SINOTEK’s solution the most suitable for the pharma industry?

A: As we grew in the sector, we started to acquire companies dedicated to providing other services for the pharmaceutical industry, for instance an analytical laboratory, a pharmaceutical development laboratory and a chemical laboratory for our food and beverages segment. This has enabled GRUPO SINOTEK to gain a deeper understanding of the industry, to the point of being shareholders of a Pharmaceutical company dedicated to high potency drugs.

Q: What are GRUPO SINOTEK’s short-term plans?

A: Local drug manufacturers are being challenged due to the open medicine purchasing scheme. We have seen two sides of the story: manufacturers that are betting everything to remain competitive and win the tenders and others that have lost hope of filling an order. Within this scenario, we want to encourage the former and work with the industry to realize the benefits of being a company that knows the industry and that manufactures locally. We can identify many plants in need of equipment maintenance or replacement and we can prove advice for better performance or specialization depending on a company’s capacities or market opportunities. This industry has a great deal of potential and we see it reflected in laboratories such as Liomont and Landsteiner, both of which are working on different COVID-19 developments.

GRUPO SINOTEK provides equipment, machinery and services for the development of industrial solutions in the pharmaceutical, medical, nutraceutical, food and beverage, energy and agri-food sectors