Daiichi Pharmaceutical Company Pharmaceutical Plant, Beijing, China

Daiichi Sankyo Company Ltd completed a pharmaceutical plant at Beijing on 6 June 2000. The facility is located in the Beijing economic and technological development area in China.

The plant was actually built by Daiichi Pharmaceutical Company Ltd, but on 1 July 2006 the company merged with Sankyo Company to form Daiichi Sankyo Company Ltd.

Mr Takashi Shoda was appointed president and CEO of Daiichi Sankyo Company Ltd and as of July 2008 he still held the role.

The formation of the company began as a joint holding company on 28 September 2005. The European part of the merger was finalised on 31 March 2007.

Daiichi Sankyo is one of the top three pharmaceutical companies in Japan and one of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies worldwide. It has about 2,300 medical representatives in 33 locations throughout Europe and the US.

PLANT CONSTRUCTION TIMESCALE

The factory began construction in Beijing's economic and technological development area in October 1998. The project was completed in June 2000, with the construction of an office and quality control building, solid-pharmaceutical facilities, warehouse and engineering buildings.

In addition to the solid pharmaceutical production line, Daiichi completed a new production line for injectable pharmaceuticals of plastic bottle packages in 2002.

TABLETS AND INJECTION

The main products manufactured in the plant are the antibacterial agent's Cravit tablets and Translon tablets, Tarivid tablets, and Cravit injection. For the production phase, Daiichi has strengthened its quality assurance systems and reduced product defects through the methodical introduction of good manufacturing practices (GMP) procedures devised in-house.

To increase manufacturing efficiency, the factories of all Daiichi Group companies worked to sharpen their focus on technological fields in which they are particularly proficient and shift operations involving other technologies to the group factories that are best positioned to handle them.

The company also created a unified information management system for all its factories and R&D facilities and steadily increased the number and upgraded the qualifications of factories' technical and quality assurance specialists. The Daiichi Group built a manufacturing system that is compliant with international quality assurance standards to ensure a cost-efficient, stable supply of all the company's products, from prescription drugs to diagnostic reagents.

THE PLANT

The site of the plant extension is 47,800m². The building space is 6,900m² and the floor space is 11,400m². The facilities built comprise an administrative/quality control building, solid pharmaceutical production, injectable pharmaceutical production, warehouse, engineering buildings, and utility facilities.

The plant capacity for solid pharmaceuticals is for 200 million tablets/year (film coating tablets, plain tablets). In addition to the current solid pharmaceutical production line, Daiichi completed a new production line for injectable pharmaceuticals of plastic bottle packages in 2002. The injection production capacity is of (plastic bottle packages) 2 million bottles/year.

Equipped with production equipment and quality control systems, DPB started sales of its first locally produced product, Cravit tablets, in 2001.

The total investment in the plant was approximately $65.5m.