Stellagen and Inno Bio field trip

Stellagen Sdn. Bhd. was incorporated in 2002 that run by Mr. Nur Hilmy Ahmad that acts as CEO with five staffs behind him with different educational field background, which operate the whole company. It was established with the primary goal of recognizing, emergent and commercializing microbiology and biochemical industries technologies that was related to animal and consumer health. The company is running a product which called StellarLac, which act as feed supplement or growth promoter for poultry (mainly chicken) product. Thus, this product can be said a substitute component in a poultry production, instead of injecting antibiotic or feed them with antibiotic-based food that can cause harm towards human. Cause can be in term of the chicken itself will be immune or resistant toward the antibiotic if they keep supplying it to the chicken, or, chemical component that happen to occur in the antibiotic itself will affect human health when we cook and consume the chicken.

Thus, in order to overcome the normal antibiotic injection method, Stellagen company have now come with and want to commercializing a first product called StellarLac, which has undergone a 15 years research in University Putra Malaysia with all of the Master and PhD students. It is known as probiotic since the product is consisted of 11 strains of friendly bacteria from a species of Brevis, Salivarius, Reuteri and Gallinarum sp. that can improve a chicken's intestinal bacteria balance and its digestion of chicken feed. It also helps to restore the presence of beneficial bacteria, which strengthen the intestinal system against disease-causing organisms.
          StellarLac is the pioneer product of the company which is an award winning direct fed microbials for poultry. It is proven to be a natural growth promoter and increase growth performance by improving feed conversion in chicken. StellarLac also act as a hypolipidaemic agent to reduce fat and cholesterol. With all the characteristics, StellarLac is the best possible way to produce a healthy, antibiotics and drugs free chicken.

 When we want to make the comparison between Stellagen with the Inno Biologics, there are certainly big differences with those two companies, which first, in term of what they are offering. For Stellagen, the company was offering a product which is StellarLac feed supplement, rather than Inno Bio which is offering services like cell line development, antibodies service, expression of recombinant protein using mammalian system, cGMP (current good manufacturing practices) and also training in term of laboratory management. Thus, the Inno Bio seems to have need more funding in order to setup and running their company in which the Inno Bio is type of Government Link Company (GLC) that get the funding from Ministry of Finance.

In comparison with the Stellagen, it is private companies that build by a group of people, which their still got the funding by the government around 1.8 million in order to start up their company. Besides, the Stellagen also got the funding from other sources. In term of the company business prospect, Inno Bio was established in order to construct and provide the best infrastructure and facilities for bio-technopreneurs in Malaysia, whereby for Stellagen, they want to commercializing microbiology and biochemical industries technologies that was related to animal and consumer health. In term of business sale and profit making, Inno Bio can be said as making as much of profit and sale compared to the Stellagen since the Inno Bio was making a lot of services including certain products. When it comes to which company is more focusing to market their products or services, Stellagen can be said better than the Inno Bio since they are only came out with on product. Thus, they can be more specific as they want in term of R&D, selling, management and so on. So, they might be said can provide a much superior and quality sort of product rather than Inno Bio that need to divide their skill and workmanship to diverse services area.

At the moment, the main export market of this StellarLac is in the region of Southeast Asia. Thus, in future time, the company might target certain countries like China, India and also Iran in order to expand and spread out their business. Besides, since the current penetration of the product within the local market is only 2% from the other established product, the company might in future want to higher their target business to 5% in the local market. From what that has been told to us, the 2% penetration itself is just a big achievement for them since there is around four million of chicken that have been produced per day, and most of them is just applying the conventional antibiotic. Thus, I can see why the increment of 3% was such a big success for them.

To say how the company will grow in 10 years after, I can see that the company may be succeeded in what their have done today as the people can be educated day by day by the awareness of antibiotic usage in poultry product. As people have been educated, the people and farmers will switch to something that is worth for a greater good, which is StellarLac.

All in all, the trip was met my expectation in term of gain knowledge much better towards the biotech fields or industries that actually have mushrooming rapidly in Malaysia. I, as a personal have been able to see how does a company want to start up with their product, invention or business, how they manage their company, how actually the research and development was done, the up and down in running a business and many valuable information. Besides, from the perspective of the Stellagen Company itself, what that I impress with them is their concern on making a new type of poultry supplement instead of conventional antibiotic that can benefits the consumers, including our health. Thus, I wish that the greatest success for the company to become a giant once in the future.