This is a necessary step, or almost before our holiday meals: the anti-Covid test. Self-tests are so popular that some pharmacies are even out of stock. However, at NG Biotech, in Guipry-Messac, one of the main market leaders, we have worked hard in recent weeks. Interview with Milovan Stankov-Pugès, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
As the holidays approach, we assume you’re running at full speed?
Indeed, we were all taken aback during the month of November. PNo one had anticipated this fifth wave, so we have increased our production capacities since mid-November. We asked our partners who also help us to carry out the kitting, Bretagne Ateliers as well as Boiron, to increase our production capacity to go to finished products and be able to deliver to pharmacies as quickly as possible.
How many kits are you able to produce today?
As a kit per month, we can go up with the current infrastructure to a maximum of 5 million tests. There, over the last two weeks of December, we will be able to deliver around 1.5 million tests so that they can be found in pharmacies before December 31. There is a demand because as the holidays approach, people want to test themselves before meeting with their family and also to protect those most at risk.
Should we fear a shortage of self-tests in our pharmacies in the coming days, the coming weeks?
The difficulty is that thewe cannot increase production capacities overnight. There may be a few weeks or there will be shortages until such time as NG Biotech and other manufacturers can increase their production capacity. The main difficulty is that we have no guarantees. We have to manage the business in a very pragmatic way. If we had guarantees, that is to say security, that the stock will be sold or failing that it would be reimbursed at least even if it is at cost price, there, we could take more risks and perhaps manufacture a stock of 50 million tests for example.
If the Omicron wave continues and spreads, do you plan to step up?
We could create another night shift, so that could create about 50 additional jobs. For their part, Bretagne Ateliers and Boiron have about sixty people who work together for the assembly of the kits and these numbers could double, triple as and when demand. One of the advantages of our technology is that we are able to increase production capacity fairly quickly, in a few months. In two or three months, we can double, we could do 10 or 15 million monthly tests.
Approximately how long do you need to update, to re-engage, to meet demand, at the highest level?
With our infrastructure, in a few weeks we can increase to five million tests per month and after that, we need two or three months to be able to double, triple this capacity internally. Then, with external partners, we could in two or three months still rise to 25 million tests per month. But once again we have to have the guarantees that if we do all this work, all this development, that there will be outlets.