Sydney-based manufacturer of complementary healthcare products, Sphere Healthcare, is to significantly expand its packaging and production facilities to cater for growing demand for its products in Australia and Asia, thanks to a capital injection of $11 million.
The company has announced it has signed up a new cornerstone investor from Asia, who has provided it with a new capital pool to finance a retooling of the business that will see the introduction of a range of new products and services while also significantly increasing both capacity and technical capability.
Sphere managing director, Paul Riley, told PKN the new funding and packaging and production expansion plans capped off a period of investment and restructuring to meet increasing demand in both domestic and offshore markets.
“”The good thing about the Asian market at the moment is that it values Australian-made product, particularly in the food and healthcare areas,” he told PKN.
“The Sphere business has been through a period of significant transformation over the past 12 months where virtually every single aspect of our operations has been targeted for improvement,” he said.
“The demand for complementary healthcare products continues to grow strongly with key drivers being demand for soft-gel Omega-3 formulations and, in offshore markets particularly, infant formula, which is why our transformation has been adding significant production capacity to deliver on medium and long term growth in demand.”
He said the company's main production facility in Moorebank, in Sydney's west, already boasts one of the largest soft-gel manufacturing capacities in south-east Asia and is now ramping up its bottling and packaging capacity by 400 per cent.
Riley said Sphere will also expanded production capacity for infant formula, with the potential to add an additional $30 million to its bottom line.
He said the company recently installed a new canning line and was now looking to commission another line in the next six months to dramatically increase its filling capacity and ability to export to the Chinese market.
Other key initiatives will include:
- Introducing further automation in production which will enable the introduction of tamper-proof packaging;
- The commissioning of a new bottling line for complementary medicines, which is expected to be up and running early next year;
- Introducing further automation in production which will enable the introduction of tamper-proof packaging;
- Production equipment upgrades resulting in annual savings of approximately $850,000 annually, or $4.5 million over five years; and
- Increasing capacity for testing to ensure quality control.
“The packaging area in the past has been a real bottleneck for Sphere – we have not been particularly automated, but now we aim to change that,” Riley told PKN.
