ATMI LifeSciences, a wholly owned subsidiary of ATMI Inc. of Danbury, has created a joint venture with Hong Kong-based Austar to produce and market high-end sterile packaging for the pharmaceutical industry in the Asia-Pacific region, including China.
Belgium-based ATMI LifeSciences distributes its sterile materials packaging to the pharmaceutical industries in Europe and the United States, said Dean Hamilton, director of investor relations and corporate communications in Danbury. “We”™re working to create some local manufacturing capability in Asia for ATMI LifeSciences products and create redundant capacity” for the subsidiary”™s Belgium operations, he said.
The joint venture will be called ATMI Austar LifeSciences Ltd., and will give ATMI LifeSciences access to the pharmaceutical ingredient market and the biopharmaceutical market in the Asia-Pacific region. The joint venture will produce film-based, single-use packaging products for the markets.
“The pharmaceutical market in Asia is expanding rapidly as more multinational firms extend their manufacturing capabilities into this region,” said Mars Ho, chief executive officer of Austar. “Local supply and support is an important competitive differentiator.”
Austar provides engineering design, project management support and technical support services to the China pharmaceutical industry.
ATMI”™s Belgium subsidiary creates clean-room single-use packaging the pharmaceutical industry uses to make limited quantities of pharmaceuticals. ATMI bought the Belgium materials packaging company eight years ago and evolved it into LifeSciences. “It”™s been below the radar screen and sort of low level for several years,” Hamilton said.
“There is a growing demand from the pharmaceutical industry for the kind of packages we produce for the semiconductor industry,” Hamilton said. “Nobody has more stringent cleanliness requirements than the semiconductor industry and the pharmaceutical industry has the same sort of concerns. It”™s a somewhat logical progression for pharmaceuticals to look to semiconductor materials suppliers.”
ATMI is marketing the advanced materials packaging to the major pharmaceutical companies in this country and in Europe, as well as emerging Asian markets. The Belgium unit is responsible for about 5 percent of ATMI”™s overall revenues, but the company is planning on incrementally increasing market share and revenues from the unit. “We”™re not creating a dramatic change in revenues, but hope to improve our market penetration,” Hamilton said.
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