Industry Outlook 2025: European Political Impacts on the Supply Chain

The instability in the European geopolitical climate, as well as other areas of the world, has created some nerves in many industries, but the increased focus on the need to have a healthy and safe supply chain for pharmaceuticals is one positive outcome of a tumultuous time, according to Edwin Stone, CEO of Cellular Origins.

“I think for a long time, people took [supply chains] for granted. There was a narrative that has been born over the last 20-plus years that just in time, was the right model,” says Edwin Stone, CEO of Cellular Origins. “And of course, that's very true in a situation where you're putting a box of corn flakes on a shelf, and every extra week that corn flakes packets on the shelf is probably knocking a quarter off of your margin on it. So, by week four, effectively you're giving away for free. That's not so true in medicines. In medicines, we need to take a bigger picture view. We need to look at the accounts differently. I know companies that took very pragmatic views 10 years ago, to set up facilities where they would hold stock of 18-month supply of certain consumables. And it took a lot of warehousing to do it. This was equipment, supply people. But what it meant was, through the construct supply constraints, we saw, for example, through COVID, that they were able to actually continue to supply where others couldn't. The rationale, actually, the shelf space of these high-value consumables was a fraction compared with the value when they sold them to the customer. So, I think what's been really good is [the instability] has caused that focus on supply chain. I think it's managed to remove some of the assumptions of certainty and some of the lack of risk consideration that we'd got into.”

Click the video above to watch the full interview.

About the speaker

Edwin Stone is CEO of Cellular Origins.