Galenika Pharmacia produces more than 50 different medical devices – sterile and non-sterile compresses, plaster strips, bandaid plasters, bandages and sanitary materials, vehicle first aid kits, cabinets and first aid packs – and last year it also supplied us with surgical masks when they were most important
This renowned domestic company supplies all healthcare institutions in the country, from health centres, pharmacies and pharmaceutical facilities, via private and state hospitals and clinics, to large health centres.
Your company had stable production and the certain placement of its products of unquestionably high quality for years, and then came the pandemic. And everything changed overnight, right?
Yes, that’s right … The Coronavirus changed everything. Until then, our factory had produced the complete range of sanitary consumables – compresses, gauzes, bandages, disinfectants, and then, practically overnight, surgical masks became the number one product.
The pandemic also taught us how to react at lightening speed and how to switch to products that we’d previously only had as a supplement to our portfolio. We switched machines that hadn’t previously had that purpose to the function of producing masks 24 hours a day, and during that period, when things were at their toughest, our employees exerted superhuman effort.
Drivers worked for 24 hours, all employees were on call 24 hours a day, in readiness to respond to every call. Work was done in three shifts, with invoicing and deliveries also carried out at night. We should also make special mention of the fact that the pandemic led to the establishing of excellent cooperation between competing companies, which wasn’t the case before, particularly not in this form or scope.
Galenika Pharmacia is a member of the German-Serbian Chamber of Commerce, which is yet more confirmation for us and our work, because the German market only accepts goods of the best quality
It wouldn’t be strange if the speed of production, changes to the production programme and work around the clock had led to a fall in quality, but that didn’t happen at your company…
Believe it or not, we managed to maintain quality, which is testified to by the fact that, for example, the “Beograd” Pharmaceutical Institution, as the country’s largest such institution, didn’t have a single complaint. We are very proud of our contribution to the struggle against the pandemic, which is unfortunately continuing. We also made 200,000 protective masks for children at our new plant in Petrovac na Mlavi, produced masks with silver nanoparticles for the Novak Đoković Foundation and protective masks with five protection filters.
Our surgical masks were initially distributed to the four largest clinical centres in Serbia – Belgrade, Kragujevac, Niš and Novi Sad, with the remainder sent to other health institutions. If we were able to produce millions of masks, we would have sold them, which is why I feel the need to emphasise the fact that not a single mask was sent abroad.
As we’re already on the subject of foreign trade, which are your traditional export markets? Do you stick to old partners or have you established new collaborations in recent years?
Galenika Pharmacia has for years been recording excellent export results with the B-H Federation, North Macedonia and Montenegro, while we also sell products to Nigeria and Iraq, and we’ve also been cooperating with Germany for the last two years. Our company has become a member of the German- Serbian Chamber of Commerce, which is yet more confirmation for us and our work, because it is well-known that the German market is one of the world’s most demanding and that they only accept goods of the best quality. I’m proud of the fact that we managed to secure our market leadership position and to maintain it successfully.