German glass manufacturing giant SCHOTT AG is supporting the world’s fight against COVID-19 with vials capable of holding up to 2 billion vaccination doses. The pharma glass and packaging specialist has reached agreements with leading pharmaceutical companies, including key players in India. The global agreements became effective last month and first vials are already being delivered to companies in Asia, North America and Europe.

In India, SCHOTT’s 50-50 joint venture, SCHOTT KAISHA is supplying vials for COVID-19 vaccines to Serum Institute (India) and several other players. The joint venture operates four manufacturing facilities in the country located in Jambusar and Umarsadi in Gujarat, Daman, and Baddi in Himachal Pradesh. In addition, the company produces the pharmaceutical glass tubing for the packaging itself at its global sites including one in Jambusar in Gujarat.

The specialty glass pioneer is ideally positioned to meet the challenging demand situation since it had started an investment program into its pharma business of 1 billion USD in 2019 already. In India, this includes a three-digit million-euro number for new Borosilicate glass melting tanks, and for its packaging operations an entirely new production site as well as new modules and lines.

All of SCHOTT’s 20 production sites for pharma glass and packaging are validated by regulatory bodies and pharma companies. This means that additional capacities can be used immediately without further regulatory efforts. SCHOTT already produced more than 11 billion pharma containers globally for life-saving drugs per annum, of which a nine-digit figure is manufactured locally in India.

“SCHOTT KAISHA has been known to scale up extremely fast in order to meet customer demands over the past decade”, shared Rishad Dadachanji, Director, SCHOTT KAISHA.