The Sunday News
Dumisani Nsingo, Senior Business Reporter
ONE of the country’s leading pharmaceutical and healthcare products manufacturers, Datlabs says the prevailing foreign currency shortages have severely impacted on its capacity utilisation and stalled it from embarking on its major projects.
Datlabs chief executive officer Mr Todd Moyo told Sunday News Business that the Bulawayo-headquartered company, however, successfully completed its US$4,5 million major factory refurbishment late last year.
“We have successfully installed all the machines that we purchased for the upgrade. We have also installed a new Heat, Ventilation and Air Conditioning system (HVAC system) and done other civil works to improve the manufacturing environment and comply to the required international standards. We continue to bring in additional modern laboratory equipment to help in our processes and compliance with pharmaceutical standards,” he said.
The company started the rehabilitation of its Belmont industrial areas situated pharmaceutical plant about two years ago.
“The new machinery has increased our capacity and efficiencies to produce various products but sadly this has come at a time when demand in the market has markedly slowed down but we will benefit once the economic situation improves,” said Mr Moyo.
Last year the company also installed major components of its new highly automated pharmaceutical tablet press machine.
Mr Moyo, however, said failure by the company to access adequate foreign currency was detrimental to its projected factory upgrade plans.
“The difficulties in sourcing the necessary foreign currency continues to affect our upgrade plans. We are always looking for developments that can improve our efficiencies and expand our product range.
“We will embark on our next major project as soon as the economic situation allows us to do so. We unfortunately need quite a sizeable amount of foreign currency for the project but at the moment we are not even getting enough to maintain the production of our current products,” he said.
Mr Moyo further added that: “We continue to liaise and exchange ideas with different authorities in various ministries and other institutions with a view to executing our next plans as soon as resources and economic conditions allow.”
Two years ago, the Government had pledged to assist the company to rehabilitate its intravenous fluids (IV) manufacturing plant in the wake of the cholera outbreak. The plant has been non-functional for close to 20 years and the company mooted plans to rehabilitate the IV fluids plant five years ago at a cost of US$2 million, but it has over the years been failing to do so owing to lack of funding.
“Falling consumer demand, depreciation of the currency and scarcity of same in the formal markets combined with soaring inflation and negative economic growth have affected our performances,” he said.
The shortage of foreign currency is not only derailing Datlabs’ earmarked project but it is also hampering the entire pharmaceutical industry since its players rely mostly on imports for raw material.
“Pharmaceutical factories have to comply with very high manufacturing standards and should therefore ensure that factories are maintained to very high standards and to do so we have to continually improve our manufacturing and testing machines in our laboratories as well as the environment that we operate in.
“There is no compromise in these standards and we are inspected regularly by the relevant authorities. Despite the economic challenges we have as a country, we are still required to operate within internationally approved standards,” said Mr Moyo.
The advent of the coronavirus is likely to hit hard on the country as it is mostly dependent on most of the affected countries for strategic raw materials.
“We are also facing challenges of raw material procurement from the major suppliers as they have limited exports to other countries due to the outbreak of the coronavirus particularly in India and China.
“We are likely to see prices of key raw materials such as paracetamol and other antibiotics going up and probably being scarce as supplier countries reserve critical raw materials for their own consumption,” said Mr Moyo.
