As economies around the world are suffering from the impact of Covid-19, businesses are experiencing losses, workers are without jobs, and many face the challenge of a complete upheaval of lifestyle. However, pharmaceutical companies are taking center stage in the Covid-19 fight, and one of these is a Korean conglomerate, SK Group, is seeing growth on the stock market and a new burst of innovation in the infectious disease landscape as the race for treatment approval for a Covid-19 therapy takes off.

SK Group, the 2nd largest group in Korea after Samsung with an annual revenue of $213.6B in 2018, has two arms of pharmaceutical subsidiaries, SK Pharmteco, the pharmaceutical intermediate, and API manufacturer & SK Biopharmaceuticals, the new drug development.

With support from JAS APAC & JAS Worldwide, JAS Korea has become a contracted freight forwarding business partner for SK Biotek as of last December, then after months of implementation period, JAS has been handling various types of Pharmaceutical export shipments by Air & Ocean to additional International Pharmaceutical companies in Europe.

Due to the nature of the cargo, pharmaceutical products, they must be mostly carried by air freight, using special equipment such as dry ice gel/ ice pack, cool/ reefer truck, temperature-controlled storage, and even RKNs which require thorough knowledge and experience to handle such a commodity properly and in a timely manner.

The RKN e1 is a one pallet size container, based on a second-generation active temperature control system and utilizes compressor cooling and electric heating technology, to meet the requirements of the pharmaceutical industry for smaller air shipments.
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The RKN e1 container maintains product temperatures in the +2 to +8 °C range, controlled room temperature (+15 to +25 °C) range,  JAS Korea has successfully arranged 11 RKN e1 for its door to door delivery to a Spanish Pharmaceutical consignee with Dap term in March, when the Pandemic was in the peak.

SK Pharmteco’s subsidiary, AMPAC is one of the strategic partners to a U.S. public benefit drug manufacturing corporation, which recently received federal government funding of $354 million for advanced manufacturing of America’s most essential medicines at risk of shortage, including those for the COVID-19 response. With its strategic partners, it has initiated manufacturing chemical precursor ingredients, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), and finished dosage forms for over a dozen essential medicines to treat hospitalized patients with COVID-19-related illnesses.

SK Biotek will supply pharmaceutical intermediates to AMPAC and has appointed JAS Korea as the logistics provider for this project. The 1st air shipment was exported to AMPAC in California, USA by suing 5 x RKN e 1 in close cooperation with JAS San Francisco on June 15th, all 5 x RKNs were successfully delivered to AMPAC on the next day. After the ingredient’s analysis main orders will be placed shortly and JAS will continue to handle this business. Next opportunity will be export business out of AMPAC to overseas with the finished products.

JAS Korea is continuing to expand their reputation as the perfect solution for the transportation of pharmaceutical products in the market with these continued efforts excellent team-work. We are sure JAS will be leading the market in a near future.

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