Five minutes with Steven Spardel, Sales Manager, Exeris – DCAT Week ‘18

PH: Exeris is a very new company. Can you explain exactly what it does?

Steven Spardel

Steven Spardel

Spardel: Exeris was founded in June 2017 and is a manufacturers’ representative. We are essentially a sales organisation, promoting the service offering and the brand of our client chemical manufacturers. We contract with them under exclusive arrangements to market their custom manufacturing services to the pharmaceutical chemical industry, both the end user pharma companies and those companies’ CMOs. You could say that our model is to be a CMO to the CMOs and that we help our pharmaceutical customers manage the network behind their network.

PH: Did you perceive a gap in the market that you thought needed to be filled?

Spardel: If you built a frequency histogram of problems causing delay in the pharmaceutical chemicals supply chain, the highest incidence is caused by a problem from the raw material supplier to an API CMO and this will typically originate somewhere near the start of the supply chain in Asia. Our value proposition is to build a more robust supply chain and to extend to our customers a service to increase reliability through transparency, project management and through finding fit-for-purpose suppliers to essentially inoculate our supplier network with missing DNA that helps them better understand their client and their client’s client.

PH: What kind of companies do you represent?

Spardel: We currently have two clients: SRF, a large Indian company with a speciality in fluorine chemistry for many different applications, and Synthetics China, a Chinese fine chemical company based near Shanghai. We represent them with the aim of growing their custom manufacturing business in pharma.

PH: Do you have an office there as well?

Spardel: Exeris has a staff of about ten people in China who are very knowledgeable about the fine chemical industry in that country. Their primary responsibility is to find out who is really making required raw materials and then to manage the custom projects within our client manufacturers, so that the final client knows exactly where everything that is delivered to them comes from. What I like to say is that our job is to build a sight glass into our client manufacturers’ reactors so that at the end of the day there are no interruptions to supplies and no surprises for our end user customers.

PH: Is this model generating a lot of interest?

Spardel: Yes, we’re generating interest and building a pipeline. The sales side of our business takes months or even years to come to fruition, of course, so our first concern is to build a pipeline. What is most encouraging is that the market has been extremely receptive to both our manufacturer’s representative business model as well as the concept of the service we are providing.