HMD wins bid for 265 million AD Syringes for COVID vaccination as L-1

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Hindustan Syringes and Medical Devices (HMD) has received another Governmmet order of 265 million AD Syringes to supply till September this year (against their original bid for 220 million pcs) against the 350 million pcs tender taken out by the Government for which they were L1.

HMD is also on track to finish the three orders received from the GoI on 0.5 ml AD syringes of 177.5 million pcs by March this year.

“This is in addition to our ongoing global commitments to support global vaccination projects for 0.1ml and 0.5 ml AD Kojak syringes in developing world whether for Yellow Fever or Measles or Hepatitis B or Pentavalent or BCG etc. in addition to COVID vaccination requirements of 0.3ml for Pfizer’s vaccines or 0.5 ml AD Kojak for Astra Zeneca/ Serums or Bharat Biotech’s vaccines,” said Rajiv Nath, Managing Director of Hindustan Syringes and Medical Devices.

“India is our priority and comes first but we do have to honor our global commitments and play a balancing role. So, for now we are allocating 2/3 capacity of KOJAK to GoI and 1/3 to our regular global UN clients. We are happy to complement Vaccines Diplomacy with Syringes Diplomacy and raise the Brand India flag in over 120 countries worldwide.” added Nath.

Wealthier nations like the United States, Britain, France and Germany poured billions of dollars into developing COVID vaccines. However, for injecting these  vaccines the World needed 8 to 10 billion syringes. Officials in the United States and European Union said they do not have enough syringes of the right kind, for the vaccines.

“We sensed a big opportunity in April 2020. We have successfully retooled our existing Dispovan disposable syringes production lines to use them to make KOJAK Auto Disable Syringes. We have had to rehire the 1000 people to replace those who had left us during the onset of COVID and train them the skills and quality consciousness. Fortunately our technology permits this flexibility of switching between these designs and we have a capable and motivated team to take on these challenges of spike in global demand and scramble for the humble three cent (approx. 2 Rs.) syringes that’s needed for drug delivery of relatively expensive vaccines that cost 100 to 1000 times. HMD initiated investment of over 15 Million dollars (approx. Rs100 Cr) in May 2020 to mass produce Specialty syringes even before Purchase orders were even in sight,” said Rajiv Nath.

From 500 million pcs per annum capacity of 0.5 ml AD Syringes in June 2020 we are currently producing at 800 million per annum and hope to achieve capacity of 1 billion by June and 1.2 Billion per annum by September this year for this one size alone.

This is the size sought by Public Healthcare in India and most countries for COVID. For Private Healthcare the Dispovan Disposable Syringes are still popular but we see a shift by the progressive hospitals who wish to assure their patients of higher injection safety. One Injection One Syringe.

Now our machines crank out more than 3.75 lac syringes per hour at our factories spread over 11 acres in Faridabad industrial district in Haryana. HMD produces over 2.5 billion assorted syringes a year and we are planning for scaling this up to three billion by July to ensure no shortages in India.

We have received orders for 240 million KOJAK syringes for COVAX via UNICEF and 79 million for Brazil for Dispovan syringes via PAHO which we are executing alongside. We have shipped 140 million KOJAK syringes to COVAX in Dec 2020. HMD has also recently sold 15 million syringes to the Japanese government.

In totality, the company serves over 120 countries worldwide who depend upon our affordable Kojak and DispoVan syringes with minimal pain needles.

Over 440 million KOJAK syringes will be supplied to GoI for India’s massive vaccination drive by September including 177 million by April this year alongside supplies of Dispovan to the Private Hospitals and Vaccination Clinics.

“This is a very risky business and in initial years of investment, it is a negative cash flow being very competitive. In COVID times it’s been challenging to ramp up capacity as the precision engineering demands are tremendous at these high speeds of production for which our suppliers in Switzerland, Germany Italy, Japan etc usually take 9-12 months and not only do we need to do capital investments to increase the syringes production but also for the needles used to assemble with them and then for the cannula – needle points grinding that’s needed to make the needles and then even the stainless steel tubing that’s required to make these Cannulas (needle points) as we are fully vertically integrated and make our own raw materials as we always had followed the philosophy to be Atmanirbhar,” said Nath.