Emirates SkyCargo has launched a purpose-built facility at Dubai International Airport dedicated to the transportation of temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical shipments and has also been certified under the European Union’s Good Distribution Practice guidelines for medicinal products for human use, covering its handling of pharmaceuticals at both Dubai International Airport and Al Maktoum International Airport.
“Every day, pharmaceutical products are critical to the health and well-being of people, and are transported from their place of manufacture to destinations across the world,” said Nabil Sultan, divisional senior vice president of cargo at Emirates [left in photo below]. “For many of these products, such as vaccines, the time taken to transport the product from its origin to the destination is of critical importance and the air cargo industry plays an important role.”
The new, 4,000-square-metre SkyPharma facility is part of the 11,000-square-metre extension of Emirates’ cargo terminal at DXB, and features two temperature-controlled zones of 2°C to 8°C and 15°C to 25°C, 88 cool cells and five temperature-controlled acceptance and delivery truck docks.
Approximately 82% of all cargo at Dubai’s two airports is in transit. Pharma shipments are transported between the passenger hub at DXB and the freighter hub at DWC by a fleet of 12 reefer trucks.
“Emirates SkyCargo is the first cargo airline in the world that has obtained GDP certification for its multi-airport hub operation,” said Sultan. “This covers the two airports and the 24/7 bonded trucking service that connects them. Emirates SkyCargo also operates the largest GDP-certified area in the world, offering 8,600 square metres of combined handling space dedicated for pharmaceutical products at Dubai International Airport and Dubai World Central. The fact that the audit was conducted and successfully passed in the month of June earlier this year, during the peak of the summer season in Dubai, also demonstrates SkyCargo’s capability to securely transport pharmaceutical products under extreme weather conditions.”
The certification was awarded by Bureau Veritas after an audit process carried out by the agency’s team from Germany. Bureau Veritas awarded the airline industry’s first GDP certification to Cargolux in 2014.
“Internationally accepted pharmaceutical GDP guidelines demand that the companies handling and transporting pharmaceutical products align their operations with a list of defined standards,” said Ahmad Chaouk, vice president of sales and marketing for the Middle East, India, Caspian Sea and Africa operating group at Bureau Veritas [right in photo]. “The global pharmaceutical industry is booming. At the moment, it is estimated to grow at a pace of 22-23% between 2014 and 2018. Along with this growth, there is also a growth in the demand for the GDP certification. Emirates is again taking the lead and is obviously the benchmark in the region to achieve such growth. They have every reason to be proud.”
The International Air Transport Association offer an alternative to GDP in the form of its Center of Excellence for Independent Validators in Pharmaceutical Logistics certification, which currently seems to be the more popular option, with Air France, CAL Cargo Airlines, Finnair, KLM, Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines all being CEIV Pharma-certified.
“We did a survey across all our customer base, and the outcome was that they called for the same standards,” said Sultan. “Therefore it made perfect sense for us to become GDP-compliant rather than anything else. It’s purely driven by our customers’ needs and requirements.”
According to Emirates, SkyPharma represents a total investment of about Dh600 million (US$163 million). Sultan said that this was worth it, despite a longer-term plan to eventually shift all operations to DWC.
“We have invested in all these facilities because we still operate here and we’ll be here for quite some time,” he said, declining to give a more precise timeline. “As long as we continue to operate, it is absolutely critical for us to ensure that we keep on investing in our product offering to satisfy our customers. With that in mind, we can’t take a step backward. We have to make sure that at any given time, our product remains powerful and strong.”
The certification of the Dubai hub is just the first step of a broader strategy. Sultan said that the second stage will be to start looking at specific origin and destination pairs that will need to be GDP-compliant at both ends.
“This is a work in progress,” he said. “We’re looking at how this can work with our partners across the globe, to ensure that they also upgrade their facilities to meet the GDP standards.”
SkyCargo hopes that this will happen in the near future.
“Keeping the number of destinations we have in mind, it is a mammoth task,” said Sultan. “But we’re quite determined to set priorities and identify which are the lanes where we expect a large movement of pharma between the two destinations. Those are the ones we will tackle first, but I suspect that within a year or so we should be able to put something together.”
According to the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, the total pharmaceutical production in Europe in 2015 was worth approximately €225 billion (US$245 billion), making it the world’s largest manufacturer. Emirates believes that the new certification and Dubai’s geographical location give SkyCargo a distinct advantage when dealing with pharmaceuticals on the two biggest lanes: Switzerland and Germany to Asia, which it says represents about 50% of all pharma movement across the world, and India to the US, which represents about 30% of the total movement.
“Our new Emirates SkyPharma facility and our new GDP certification will allow us to work even more closely with our partners in the pharmaceutical industry,” said Sultan. “In addition, our dedicated pharma-handling facility at Dubai will further consolidate Dubai’s position as a leading transportation hub for healthcare and pharma logistics.”
By Jeffrey Lee
Asia Cargo News | Dubai
