25/January/10

Sepha, Thrives despite downturn

Enterprise Equity backed manufacturing firm, SEPHA, has bucked the economic downturn with a 33% increase in sales for 2009...

Sepha manufactures innovative leak testing, deblistering and blister packing machines for the pharmaceutical industry. Much of its growth has come from export markets, particularly the low labour cost economies of India, Asia and South America.

Sepha’s Chief Executive, Aubrey Sayers, explains “Markets such as India and China offer a lower manufacturing cost base for western pharma companies, but when it comes to pharmaceuticals, the emphasis must still be on production quality. Sepha’s machines offer an automated way of checking the quality of drug packaging which further saves on production costs.”

Within western economies, Sepha has also been able to take advantage of the drive by its customers to reduce waste and disposal costs. Sepha’s innovative machines safely remove valuable product from defective packs, allowing them to be repackaged and sold on to the customer.

In addition its range of leak testing machines, which are used to detect holes in pharmaceutical blister packs, sachets and pouches, offer a clean, non-destructive alternative to the widely used and messy liquid dye leak test which results in unnecessary waste of valuable product, whether the packaging is defective or not.

Sepha is already doing business with many of the world’s top pharmaceutical manufacturers including Boots, Bayer and Wyeth. It has been designing and building machines in Northern Ireland since 1980 and currently employs 20 people.

In 2005 it was subject to an equity-backed management buy-out led by Enterprise Equity. Craig Holmes of Enterprise Equity, who sits on the Company's board as non-executive director said that “a focused investment in international sales and marketing and an increase in production capacity since the buy-out had started to pay off for Sepha. Enterprise Equity are always on the look-out for local companies who can show strong prospects of long term growth and are in need of funding to realise their goals.”


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