CZECH FIRM SETS GLOBAL ROUTE

Abstract

Even social experiments cannot run forever on their own, and for Interpharma Praha, a small Prague-based producer of fine chemicals, the time has come to find partners. That is the conclusion of Chairman Milos Sovak, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and of the company's president, Guido Bischofberger, who also heads Interpharma's office in Zurich. The two have rebuilt an enterprise that was essentially derelict and ready to be shut down in 1990 by the then-Czechoslovak government. In the process, Sovak and Bischofberger are teaching Czechs, who had been imbued with communist doctrine, to be capitalists. From that point of dereliction, Sovak says, this company now has brought itself to a level equivalent to Western Europe. Since the early 1990s, the company has grown from less than $1 million in sales to about $25 million per year in sales of compounds ranging from iodinated precursors for radiographic contrast media to specialty ...