sydneybased manufacturer of complementary healthcare products, sphere healthcare, is to significantly expand its packaging and production facilities to cater for growing demand for its products in australia and asia, thanks to a capital injection of 11 million.sphere healthcare&39s new canning line for infant formula will enable it to meet strong growth opportunities for its products in china.the company has announced it has signed up a new cornerstone investor from asia, who has provided it with a new capital pool to finance a retooling of the business that will see the introduction of a range of new products and services while also significantly increasing both capacity and technical capability.sphere managing director, paul riley, told pkn the new funding and packaging and production expansion plans capped off a period of investment and restructuring to meet increasing demand in both domestic and offshore markets.&ldquo&rdquothe good thing about the asian market at the moment is that it values australianmade product, particularly in the food and healthcare areas,&rdquo he told pkn.&ldquothe sphere business has been through a period of significant transformation over the past 12 months where virtually every single aspect of our operations has been targeted for improvement,&rdquo he said.&ldquothe demand for complementary healthcare products continues to grow strongly with key drivers being demand for softgel omega3 formulations and, in offshore markets particularly, infant formula, which is why our transformation has been adding significant production capacity to deliver on medium and long term growth in demand.&rdquohe said the company&39s main production facility in moorebank, in sydney&39s west, already boasts one of the largest softgel manufacturing capacities in southeast asia and is now ramping up its bottling and packaging capacity by 400 per cent.riley said sphere will also expanded production capacity for infant formula, with the potential to add an additional 30 million to its bottom line.he said the company recently installed a new canning line and was now looking to commission another line in the next six months to dramatically increase its filling capacity and ability to export to the chinese market.other key initiatives will includeintroducing further automation in production which will enable the introduction of tamperproof packaging the commissioning of a new bottling line for complementary medicines, which is expected to be up and running early next yearintroducing further automation in production which will enable the introduction of tamperproof packaging production equipment upgrades resulting in annual savings of approximately 850,000 annually, or 4.5 million over five years and increasing capacity for testing to ensure quality control.&ldquothe packaging area in the past has been a real bottleneck for sphere &ndash we have not been particularly automated, but now we aim to change that,&rdquo riley told pkn. 
