Issued by: Topics Magazine 2010 Jan Issue
Issued on: 2010/01

Observing its 20th anniversary, the company sets out plans for continued robust expansion.

BY DON SHAPIRO

Roger Samuelsson, president of Scandinavian Health Ltd. (SHL), has every reason to look back with pride. The company he founded in Taoyuan 20 years ago has grown from humble beginnings – the first assembly line occupied borrowed space tucked inside a supplier’s factory – into a world leader in the design, development, and manufacture of pen injectors, auto-injectors, and other advanced drug delivery systems for the international pharmaceutical and biotech industries. What is now the SHL Group employs 1,000 workers in Taiwan and 500 more in Europe, the United States, and China, and it has proven the merit of Samuelsson’s vision of combining Asian manufacturing prowess with Western management practices.

But the 46-year-old native of Sweden is far more interested in looking ahead than reviewing past accomplishments. The SHL 20th anniversary ceremonies this October were also the occasion for opening an expansion to the group’s fifth plant in Taiwan, a 2,000-square-meter facility to house highly sophisticated tooling, CNC machining, and automation equipment. The expansion project entailed a US$15 million investment, the first portion of a pledge Samuelsson made a year ago when he signed a Letter of Intent with the Ministry of Economic Affairs committing SHL to invest US$100 million in Taiwan over the next five years.

Based on the current product-development pipeline, Samuelsson says SHL should be ready to build yet another large plant in 2011, providing at least 1,000 more job opportunities. Although the site has not been chosen, Samuelsson notes his continuing satisfaction with Taoyuan as the location for the company’s existing Taiwan operations. “It’s a good base – close to Taipei, close to the airport, and with a good talent pool of skilled people,” he says.

SHL is also planning to move forward with a project that would bring substantial investment into Taiwan beyond the US$100 million commitment. Instead of only shipping empty devices to its customers in Europe or the United States for filling with pharmaceuticals before going to end-users, SHL is proposing to create a new company that would import a given drug in concentrate form, formulate it, fill it into syringes, and load the syringes into delivery devices to make a final product.

Samuelsson describes the proposed filling venture as the logical extension of his firm belief in production integration. In an era in which outsourcing is all the rage as a means of cutting costs, his inclination is to do as much as possible in-house to ensure control of quality. That is partly due to the nature of SHL’s business – its customers, the major drug companies, insist on the absolute highest standards – and partly to what Samuelsson readily admits to being his personal obsession with quality.

When the company began, it was simply assembling parts molded by Taiwanese vendors. But Samuelsson was never completely satisfied with the level of reliability, and so he set up his own mold-making facility. The same penchant for “insourcing” followed with other parts of the operation. “Now we do everything from the beginning to the final product,” says Samuelsson. “Nobody else in this industry does that super-vertical integration.”

SHL even undertakes the design and manufacture of its own automation equipment to perform certain specialized assembly and testing functions. Where the right equipment is already available on the market, however, it purchases and installs the best it can find. Its new plant is equipped with 100 units of state-of-the-art injection-molding machines from Krauss-Maffei of Germany, as well as row after row of advanced computer-numerically-controlled machine tools from Switzerland, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan. Even outside the designated clean rooms, the plant seems as spic-and-span as a hospital; five-year-old machines are so well maintained they look brand new.

The desire for control over quality extends to the shareholding, in which Samuelsson retains 75% ownership, with the rest held by other key company executives. By refraining from going public, he says, SHL is free of stockholder pressure to make compromises to meet quarterly profit targets rather than focusing on long-term development.

As the business has evolved, three separate companies now come under the SHL Group umbrella. SHL Medical handles the main business of drug-delivery devices, SHL Healthcare develops and manufactures home- and hospital-use rehabilitation equipment (such as patient lifting slings and alternating-pressure mattress systems), and SHL Technologies produces med-tech and industrial products for clients on a project basis. Besides the Taiwan production facilities, the group operates two plants in China for more labor-intensive items, and it maintains R&D centers in Europe, the United States, Taiwan and China.

The major design and development work is done in Stockholm and Florham Park, New Jersey. “The medical business requires so much interaction with customers that it’s much easier to do it in Europe and the United States, where the customers are located,” says Samuelsson. Among the R&D team’s achievements are a Precision Pen Injector, winner of a prestigious Red Dot design award in 2009, for delivering small but highly accurate doses of a treatment for rejuvenating delicate skin. Another award-winning design is the patented Disposable Auto-Injector, which can be customized to accommodate any primary drug container.

Samuelsson first visited Taiwan in 1983 as a young amateur pugilist, curious to see the place where his boxing equipment was manufactured. After getting a degree in Sweden in mechanical engineering, he found himself back in Taiwan sourcing a wide range of merchandise for European importers, including sporting goods, bathroom fixtures, and computers and peripherals. But after discovering the good market prospects for medical devices, he saved up enough money to buy some machinery and go into production for himself. A big break came when his home-country connections brought an introduction to Swedish-based Pharmacia, which was then in the process of merging with Upjohn (now a part of Pfizer).

In the early years, “it wasn’t always easy to get market acceptance, considering the old image of ‘Made in Taiwan,’” says Samuelsson. “But now, with Taiwan’s reputation as a high-tech center and our own history of excellence, we are long past that.” As a manufacturing base, Taiwan continues to provide the advantages of a skilled, well-educated workforce and lower costs than the West. It has not lost competitiveness to China in the capital- and technology-intensive business SHL is engaged in, where labor inputs are a relatively minor factor. “When you buy a machine for a million dollars,” says Samuelsson, “you need to have a real professional to operate it.”

With the first two decades of SHL behind him, Samuelsson is ready for new challenges, such as the proposed drug-filling venture, for which he is inviting the Taiwan government to be a shareholder. He notes that since this type of operation would require U.S. FDA and European EMA approvals, it would represent a major breakthrough for Taiwan industry and help support the government’s goal of fostering the Taiwan biotech sector’s drug-development capability.

About SHL

SHL is the world’s largest privately-owned designer, developer and manufacturer of advanced drug delivery devices. We have over 1,500 staff globally (1000 staff in Taiwan), with our primary design centers located in the USA and Sweden and manufacturing centers located in Asia.

SHL supplies auto injectors, pen injectors and inhaler systems to global pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Significant investment in R&D has enhanced our broad pipeline of “next generation” drug delivery systems. These innovative devices include a range of disposable and reusable injectors with fixed or variable dosing, enhanced precision and the ability to accommodate high viscosities.

Our organization consists of three distinct group companies:

SHL Medical
Designs, develops and manufactures advanced drug delivery devices for leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies

SHL Healthcare
Develops and manufactures equipment solutions for home, hospital and long term care use

SHL Technologies
Provides contract manufacturing and engineering services for the production of complex medtech and industrial products

For additional information visit www.shl-group.com or contact us at 這個 E-mail 地址已經被防止灌水惡意程式保護，您需要啟用 Java Script 才能觀看