Zetes expands in pharma; expecting bumper 2010

Belgian coding systems company Zetes is predicting a "very good year" financially in 2010 after seeing revenues rise almost 6 per cent in the first half of the year.

The increase in sales to €88 million has come mainly from its Goods ID division, which focuses on technologies used to manage products through the supply chain using barcodes, RFID or even voice recognition systems.

On the downside, the People ID division which concentrates on electronic identification, biometric passports and secure documentation saw sales decline by 5 per cent to just under €18m, and this put pressure on operating earnings which slipped 14 per cent to €6 million.

Much of Zetes Goods ID division sales come from the food sector and the likes of Kellogg and supermarket chain Metro, but it has recently started to make forays into the pharmaceutical sector.

"From a sector perspective, the distribution sector and the pharmacy sector are the ones supporting the growth," said the firm in its interim results statement.

Zetes' activities in pharma were expanded earlier this month with the launch of a datamatrix marking, control and serialisation solution that it says will "help drug manufacturers across Europe comply with new and incoming legislation regarding the identification of secondary packaging of medical goods."

The company says its system ensures the accurate affixing of datamatrix codes, either directly on the package (coding or marking) or via real-time printed labels.

It also handles serialisation, tamper-evident sealing, and labelling with preprinted labels, and has been designed to integrate with high speed production lines, ensuring secure marking, inspection and storage of data of up to 500 packs per minute. 

One drug manufacturer has already implemented Zetes' technology in France in order to print the datamatrix codes needed to comply with the country's CIP13 batch-level coding requirements.

Alain Wirtz, chief executive of Zetes, said that improving traceability is an increasing challenge for many manufacturers.

"Our solution has been developed based upon our extensive experience with designing, building and implementing print & apply and labelling systems, which are already used by many drug manufacturers at the end of their production lines," he said.

Zetes will be showcasing its entire range of supply chain solutions for pharma at the Pharmaceutical Distribution 2010 exhibition, due to be held on September 8-9 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

In addition to the datamatrix marking and serialisation technology, it will also display an automated shipment verification system that can detect and analyse hundreds of barcodes in one sweep, and voice recognition systems for order preparation in organisations such as pharmaceutical distributors.