Sri Lanka is part of South Asia. It is an island that is surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf Mannar and the Palk Strait, and also lies in the vicinity of India and the Maldives. One of the pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities can be found in Sri Lanka, the State Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Corporation or SPMC. Their vision is to be internationally recognized a model manufacturing and marketing organization for pharmaceuticals and health care products in South Asia. And their mission is to manufacture medicinal drugs that are safe, effective, and affordable with good quality up to international standards to the local international markets.

The State Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Corporation or SPMC is a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility that has a 50,000 square feet that is equipped with modern Japanese and German machines that can annual installed capacity of 550 million units of tablets, capsules and 60,000 liters of dry syrup. And in present their production exceeds by about 95% and they are still planning to increase it further. All SPMC products comply with the combined United States Pharmacopoeia (USP) and British Pharmacopoeia (BP) standards and also the Japanese Health Ministry standards for the microbial limits for oral preparations. The atmosphere of the area where manufacturing takes place, the Ultaclean Zone is strictly controlled, the temperature, humidity, microbial count and particulate matter. All their products have high solubility and long shelf-life. Their quality control department is fully equipped with full range modern instruments for physic-chemical and microbial testing like Gas Liquid Chrornatograph, High Pressure Liquid Chrornatograph and Infrared and Ultraviolet spectrophotometers. The State Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Corporation or SPMC products are branded generics. Teir capsules and tablets have the letters SPMC and the labels clearly show their famous and respected logo with characteristic two colour bands.

Last year SPMC is seeking a loan of &10m to buy high-speed tablet and capsule filling machines and to ensure that they can meet the demand in the island for safe medicines. Because his over past 20 years the demand has increase significantly. Their facility that was designed to produce 550m tablets and capsules a year t has increased to 1035m a year when they operating for 16 hours a day but still this is still insufficient for their current demand. And also the Japanese and German equipment has been used for 22 years already. Because it is old and obsolete, the equipment has become increasingly expensive to maintain most especially it is now difficult and costly to source the spare parts if incase there are problems. They are constantly seeking to revamp its facility and looking for a financier or a funding organization that can loan them $ 10m and that they will pay the loan back within 10 years. Using the funding they plan to install high capacity machines over the next two years to minimize the disruption of supply and to help it meet the estimate demand of more than 4000m tablets and capsules per year. The SPMC is currently supplies 20 of its 59 products to the Medical Supplies Division (MSD) of the Sri Lanka Health Ministry. They also have developed several other products for the MSD have not begin the manufacturing because of capacity constraints, restricting the flow of essential medicines to Sri Lanka’s poor.