Due to serious logistical disruptions in delivering essential pharmaceutical items, Express Trailers has had to apply specialised expertise and support in order to service its pharmaceutical clients.

The situation became more complicated when major operating airlines - Emirates Airlines, Turkish airlines and Lufthansa – ceased their operation in Malta. This meant that normal flights for the shipment of time/temperature-sensitive cargo was no longer possible and the chartering and operating of a cargo aircraft meant huge amounts of money.

“Such measures resulted in huge logistic complications for the pharma industry and this is when at Express Trailers, we had to apply our logistics expertise to reinvent new solutions for our clients using multi-modal transportation,” said Franco Azzopardi, Chairman and CEO of Express Trailers.

“In our case, procurement of the active pharmaceutical ingredients which our pharma clients here in Malta import mainly from India, could no longer be brought by air to Malta. We had to provide an alternative solution to bring these ingredients, which are very vital to produce finished formulations, to Malta,” added Franco Azzopardi.

As less cargo aircrafts kept flying to European hubs, their capacity was in great demand. Express Trailers opted to route air shipments to main European hubs such as Frankfurt and Milan Malpensa airport and through its correspondents in these regions, managed to arrange the necessary customs documentations and pick up directly with its trailers from these airports.

“Had we not invested substantially in this area over the past years to meet the level required in quality, trailers, reliability of equipment and the required certifications, we would have not been able to service Malta’s pharmaceutical industry the way we have been doing over the past months.”

Currently, Express Trailers’ pharma operations are seeing the company operating weekly shipments to and from Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and UK.

Express Trailers has been servicing a number of leading pharmaceutical companies since the mid 70’s, supporting their import, export and pharma warehousing requirements as they grew their business and operations in Malta.

“Servicing some of the most reputable locally-based pharma companies in Malta meant that as their logistics operators, we had to keep updating our pharma operations alongside the continuous evolution of the stringent pharmaceuticals GDP guidelines. This helped us set the bar when it comes to compliance procedures for pharma transportation not only through constant heavy investment in our fleet and equipment but also in training of our personnel and the required certifications,” added Mr Azzopardi.

“These past three months have shown us what a critical conduit of essentials logistics is, especially when it comes to the transport of food, medical and pharmaceutical products into and out of Malta,” he added.

“Minimal cargo staff presence at airports and cargo flights full with capacity due to a high rise in demand, resulted in delays and waiting time. We kept managing delays to release and load the goods in our trailers. Our operations team did a fantastic job as they adapted to the changing situations, most of the time re-routing our trailers and jeopardising our cut off time of the scheduled roro vessel departures from Genoa. There were instances where our drivers had to load late evening or early morning, driving on holidays to meet delivery deadlines. Sometimes even involved the 2nd driver to make up for the driving restrictions.”

Since the pandemic broke, we sought to ensure that all our European operations for import and export remained ongoing, assisting all our clients to remain productive and maintain their supply to the market by optimising our routes. The complexity of the operations defined Express Trailers as a company that is truly built to serve,” added Franco Azzopardi.

Currently, imports consist mainly of weekly groupage road shipments with pharma raw and packaging material from different locations across Europe. All goods are picked through the company’s network of correspondents, meeting trailer departures’ cut-off times before arriving in Malta. Weekly groupage road shipments are then exported directly on trailer, to final destination, within 3 to 5 days.

“The transport of temperature-sensitive and time-critical pharmaceutical consignments remains a very delicate operation that requires the unquestionable expertise and a transport backbone made up of a dedicated fleet of temperature-controlled and pharma-approved trailers including dual temperature and double decker units. All our trailers are certified with the latest technology, pharma mapped and equipped with a special security lock, GPS positioning control and GPRS temperature monitoring. We also operate part load or full load trailers depending on the quantity of pallets, the delivery location and the urgency of shipment.”

“Concurrently with the pharmaceutical import and export operations, Express Trailers has also seen an upsurge of its pharma warehousing service, pharma launches both in importation, release and dispatch. Foreign pharma clients are using our importer's licence and warehousing services to dispatch directly to their EU markets from Malta,” concluded Mr Azzopardi.