A Vial Business

The Stevanato Group began 71 years ago crafting specialty bottles for perfume and wine. Now it is perfectly positioned to profit from packaging pandemic cures.

- Giacomo Tognini

At the height of Italy’s lockdown in April factories were shuttered across the country. But in Piombino Dese, a small town about 40 kilometers outside of Venice, the hulking glasscutting machines at the Stevanato Group kept whirring along, spitting out millions of ampoules and syringes. Hundreds of employees donned face masks to work around the clock in three daily shifts, seven days a week—making everything from insulin pen cartridges to miniature glass barrels and—most pressingly—millions of tiny sterile vials, each one containing less than 30 milliliters, that one day will house doses of a Covid-19 vaccine.

“Every Saturday and Sunday, even on Easter, I went to work alongside my employees to show that we were in the trenches as well,” says Franco Stevanato, the 46-year-old CEO of the group and grandson of its founder, Giovanni.

Vaccines, like most injectable drugs, need to be packaged in sterile glass. Glass is essentially impermeable to corrupting gases like oxygen while even high-grade plastic lets some air inside. Making these vials was a big business even before Covid-19 appeared in January. Last year, the global pharmaceutical industry purchased some 12 billion vials. The Stevanato Group, a 71-year-old family-owned firm, provided more than 2 billion of those (The company is also the world’s largest manufacturer of cartridges for insulin pens). A Covid-19 vaccine, which likely will have to be administered in two separate injections, will require billions of additional vials. Stevanato expects the pandemic to drive up demand for its glass vials by 20% over the next two years.