World needs syringes and this firm makes 5,900 per minute
RAJIV NATH CONFIDENT HIS COMPANY CAN HELP MEET PANDEMIC DEMAND
In late November, an urgent email popped up in the inbox of Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices, one of the world’s largest syringe makers.
It was from Unicef and it was desperately seeking syringes. Not just any would do. These syringes must be smaller than usual. They had to break if used a second time, to prevent spreading disease through accidental recycling.
Most important, Unicef needed them in vast quantities. Now. “I thought, ‘No issues,’” said Rajiv Nath, the company’s managing director, who has sunk millions of dollars into preparing his syringe factories for the vaccination onslaught. “We could deliver it possibly faster than anybody else.”
Second scramble
As countries jostle to secure enough vaccine doses to put an end to the Covid-19 outbreak, a second scramble is unfolding for syringes. Officials in the United States and the European Union have said they don’t have enough vaccine syringes. Japan revealed last month that it might have to discard millions of doses of the PfizerBioNTech vaccine if it couldn’t secure enough special syringes.
The world needs between 8 billion and 10 billion syringes for Covid-19 vaccinations alone, experts say. Not all of the world’s syringes are suited to the task. To maximise the output from a vial of the Pfizer vaccine, for example, a syringe must carry an exact dose of 0.3 millilitres.
The United States is the world’s largest syringe supplier by sales, according to Fitch Solutions, a research firm. The United States and China are neck and neck in exports, with combined annual shipments worth $1.7 billion (Dh6.2 billion). While India is a small
I thought, ‘No issues,’ [the massive Unicef demand for syringes]. We could deliver it possibly faster than anybody else.”
Rajiv Nath | MD, Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices
player globally, with only $32 million in exports in 2019, Nath of Hindustan Syringes sees a big opportunity.
Mass production
Each of his syringes sells for only three cents, but his total investment is considerable. He invested nearly $15 million to mass-produce speciality syringes, equal to roughly onesixth of his annual sales, before purchase orders were even in sight. In May, he ordered new molds from suppliers in Italy, Germany and Japan to make a variety of barrels and plungers for his syringes.
Nath added 500 workers to his production lines, which crank out more than 5,900 syringes per minute at factories spread over 11 acres in an industrial district outside New Delhi. The company churns out nearly 2.5 billion a year, though it plans to scale up to 3 billion by July.
Hindustan Syringes has a long history of supplying Unicef immunisation programmes in some of the poorest countries, where syringe reuse is common and one of the main sources of deadly infections, including HIV and hepatitis.