High-tech hub

Sigma-Aldrich puts Germany at the hub of high tech distribution to European scientific and pharma markets

Germany was one of the founding fathers of the pharmaceutical industry in the 19th century, and names such as Roche, Merck and Bayer are still around 200 years later. From the 1930s two other names, Sigma and Aldrich, which united in 1976, came to be synonymous with the supply of chemicals and biologics to the industry, and also to the laboratories, academic centres and life science firms which have burgeoned alongside it.

Globally, Sigma-Aldrich has built up a global turnover in excess of €1.0bn, and although it has production and warehousing in 34 countries across the world Germany, where it employs 640 people, remains at the hub of its European operations.

'Steady growth over 70 years turned Sigma-Aldrich into what some refer to as a sleeping giant,' concedes Gerrit van den Dool, vice president Europe, sales and operations. 'But in the last five years the company has awoken and turned itself into a more pro-active force within the industry.'

This expansion has been through both organic growth as well as acquisitions. The company owns many of the names familiar to working scientists everywhere, such as Fluka, Riedel-de Haeen, Supelco, Isotec, Ultrafine and Genosys. Recognising the value in these brands to the scientific world, the company mostly retains the names and continues to invest in further growth at the original sites.

Hence the Steinheim base for the production of Aldrich chemicals has grown to become a major manufacturing base for oligonucleotides; and the Seelze site, which was acquired with the purchase of Riedel-de Haeen, has expanded its output of chemicals and reagents and has added custom-tailored products, such as special fillings and packaging.

automated facility

Sigma-Aldrich dispatches 10,000 lines to customers every day from an inventory in excess of 85,000, and 98% of these orders are processed within 24-48 hours. This is achieved as a result of a €33m investment in the state-of-the-art distribution centre at Schnelldorf in southern Germany. The new, highly automated facility, 75% 'manned' by robots, enables Sigma-Aldrich to centralise storage and supply across Europe.

The company's European headquarters are in Munich, the original Sigma base and a city that has grown to become an important biotechnology cluster.

With rapid advances in scientific discoveries and technologies, there is a constant need for innovative products. 'Sigma-Aldrich has become a technology driver in its own right,' says van den Dool. 'We have this huge 85,000-item inventory and people have tended to assume that we must be buying most of it in. In fact we manufacture more than half of it.

customer partnership

'More than half of the €35m invested in 2003 in r&d worldwide is used for the development of new products for researchers, using cutting-edge technologies. Our main development focus is on genomics, proteomics, cell culture and small molecule-based drug discovery.'

Sigma-Aldrich's product offering spans the general needs of basic laboratory research to the more specialised needs of molecular biology in cell signalling, cell culture, protein expression and proteomics.

'We are increasingly becoming a partner for our customers from the supply of research chemicals at one end of the drug discovery chain through to the manufacturing scale-up for clinical trials and beyond,' van den Dool points out.

With its strong tradition of quality and rapid distribution in research chemicals and its ability to operate across many, diverse scientific fields, Sigma-Aldrich is well-placed to meet the requirements of both the German and the wider European market and is growing fast as a high profile brand in global life sciences.