Five minutes at CPhI North America with

Hong Zhao, CEO of Zhejiang Hisun Pharmaceutical

PH: Please introduce Zhejiang Hisun and its presence at the show.

Hong: Hisun Pharmaceutical is a major pharmaceutical company in China. Our main two areas of business are API and finished drug product. The company is moving from domestic to global. We have more than 20 ANDAs submitted and three approvals. We are actively working on our own products in the US and we supply APIs to customers globally, both generic and innovator. We have close to 10,000 employees in China and a US office in Princeton, New Jersey, which I am heading. All of our manufacturing is in China at the moment; we are thinking about the US as well in the longer term. It’s in the planning stage.

PH: What is your impression of the show?

Hong: We have been to CPhI in China and Europe before and will be again this year, as well as CPhI shows in Russia. I think this show is well attended and it’s always an opportunity for us to meet with old and new customers, who are Big Pharma companies, small biotechs and generic drug companies.

PH: Is your business strong at the moment?

Hong: It’s growing on both the API and the formulation side. Some of our customers focus on APIs, some focus on drug product and many of them want full service, to have the API developed into a finished drug product. At Hisun, we have really enormous capacity. We mainly built this for our own development but we sometimes have excess capacity which we can offer to third parties. We began as an API company and we built our capacity along with demand, and we did the same with drug product. There are some capacities that are less available in the world now, such as injectables. Strategically the company is investing a lot in this area to support our own products but sometimes we can also squeeze out a window of opportunity for our customers.

PH: Are you active along the whole of the development chain or just in manufacturing?

Hong: Every stage. We are a fully integrated company, we have R&D, manufacturing for all kind of dosage forms. We seek to work with customers end-to-end.

PH: What trends do you see in the industry challenging you?

Hong: People are paying more attention to compliance and quality. They are also being more picky about the projects they work on. We follow the trends in the market and also government policies have a lot of influence on our strategy.