Fast 50 and NZTE award for Auckland BioSciences

It’s been a week of wins for Auckland BioSciences: a life sciences startup which has just been named New Zealand’s 43rd-fastest growing business at the Deloitte Fast 50 awards tonight.

It’s the first time the company has entered the event and has made the index. The achievement comes within days of being crowned “Best Emerging Business” at the New Zealand Trade and Enterprise International Business Awards.

“We’re delighted to be recognised twice in one week as a rapidly-growing business with an exciting outlook,” Auckland BioSciences Managing Director, Dr John Chang, says.

“There’s been an extraordinary amount of work from our small team since we founded the business just four years ago to get us to where we are today, and these achievements recognise that hard work.”

Dr Chang founded Auckland BioSciences in 2014 to convert what is a commonly discarded by-product of the meat industry — bovine blood — into a high value, pharmaceutical grade serum.

The business now makes serum and plasma from a variety of animal blood and sells it to veterinary vaccine manufacturers and research institutions.

Auckland BioSciences has grown 186% over the past three years, in a global serum market worth $1.2b every year.

In four years, the startup has gone from being an industry nobody to an industry leader with customers in 14 export markets.

Dr Chang puts much of the company’s success down to its highly scientific approach, its strong customer relationships, and New Zealand’s reputation as a producer of high quality animal products.

“Our team’s scientific understanding of our product is second-to-none. This has given us the confidence to implement significantly different strategies from what the established players are doing, which are now starting to pay off.

“We’re a customer-focused company that believes in developing relationships face-to-face all around the world. We wear the soles of our boots down in an effort to meet our customers wherever they are.

“New Zealand’s focus on biosecurity and livestock health means our product is the safest in the world, which is highly attractive to our end users.”

Earlier this year, Auckland BioSciences was named Best Emerging Business at the Air New Zealand Cargo ExportNZ Awards.

At the NZTE awards last week, judge Sam Witters praised the company’s innovative approach.

“This company is just exceptional in the way that they have taken a waste product and provided commercial acumen, deep deep knowledge of this industry and have produced a world-class product.

“There’s also a kind of freshness about them, a real joy in listening to them talk about the company and where they’ve got to. I think they’re really going to be a company to watch and a company that New Zealand will be proud of.”

ENDS

© Scoop Media