For PJSC FITOFARM the far started much earlier that February 24, 2022. Our company is at the front line since 2015 when we were just 20 km far away. We worked all the time even when the company was on temporary occupied territory/ Nowadays together with all the country for over 10 months we go along the hard way to the Victory. It makes no sense to list all the difficulties we were facing with.
The major point is that we look for and find the ways and solutions.
We defined the priorities and structured our activities pursuant to new business tasks.
The first component is safety of our employees. For manufacturing facilities in the city of Bakhmut
it immediately became a very urgent issue. During the short time we evacuated our employees to more safe regions of Ukraine. Majority of them moved to Kyiv where company’s head office is located. Practically all vacancies which the company opened since the war started were filled with internal candidates. We also support army divisions where our mobilized colleagues are enrolled – supply them with goods necessary for the Victory.
Second component is ensuring maximal possible efforts in saving manufacturing facilities and produced finished products. Very specific equipment and special conditions are used for pharmaceutical manufacturing, thus it’s impossible to relocate it from one place to another. Partially we managed to move out finished products and raw materials. But the process was constantly interrupted by bombardments. The facilities are practically destroyed and can’t be rebuilt, precious expensive processing equipment is lost. Third component is to ensure company’s viability as employer and medicines manufacturer.
We understand that country’s economy shall work. Each of us who is not at the front line if fighting at the economic front. This is especially true for critically important industries – and pharmaceutical industry is among them. Being critically important envisage the duty to supply Ukrainians and Ukrainian Armed Forces with necessary medicines, to ensure means for living
to the employees and the opportunity to help the front.
Thus since we stopped manufacturing in Bakhmut at the end of April we approved the decision to manufacture our products on a contract basis using facilities of another pharma producers.
Due to efforts of our employees and a special program of the Health Ministry for pharma companies relocation from combat zones we managed to produce first batches of our products already in April. Regarding prospects… We all have only one prospect – the Victory, thus we do our best to accelerate it. What are our opportunities? Our opportunities might be limited only by air defense alarms and electricity cut-offs. No electric power generator will be sufficient to support powerful equipment used for technological pharmaceutical production. In order to ensure medicines supply to Ukrainians and economy support we negotiate allocation of orders for manufacturing in other countries with foreign producers – and already have some preliminary agreements. Actually PJSC FITOFARM is converted from a manufacturing company to marketing organization. And we will retain this status until our
Victory – and some time after that. Needless to say that construction of a new pharmaceutical facilities is quite a long process. After its completion the facility in Bakhmut quite probably might become one of the most modern pharma facility in Europe.
What trends might be outlined? The only modern trend to every Ukrainian is faith is Armed Forces, our country and our own strength. All FITOFARM employees, both at the front line and in the rear, correspond to it.
PJSC FITOFARM has its history – but the best chapters are to be written.
