Asia-Pacific has fast become a hub for pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers, and Malaysia alone is home to some of the most prominent medical device manufacturing sites in the region. On 15th May 2025, Oliver Healthcare Packaging, a leading healthcare company driving quality and innovation in medical packaging, unveiled a new manufacturing facility in Johor, Malaysia, the largest of Oliver’s sites in the APAC region. With its capabilities, the facility aims to enhance regional sourcing and address gaps in the Asia-Pacific healthcare industry. Located strategically within the i-Tech Valley in Iskandar Puteri, the facility will join a growing number of companies operating out of the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone. The opening ceremony was officiated by Yang Berhormat Tuan Lee Ting Han, Chairman of the Johor State Investment, Trade, Consumer Affairs and Human Resources Committee.
Biospectrum Asia, in a conversation with Oliver’s Michael Benevento, CEO and President and Kenneth De Muynck, General Manager, Asia Pacific, at the launch event discussed the potential and trajectories for Oliver’s latest strategic investment in the Asia Pacific region.
CEO, Michael: For the past 50 years, Oliver has been driving innovation in the healthcare industry through the design and manufacturing of medical-grade packaging. The opening of our new manufacturing facility in Johor, Malaysia, is a significant milestone in the growth and evolution of our operations in Asia. The strategic location of our new facility in Johor will enable us to operate within close proximity to our APAC customers, and will help our supply chain become more resilient to disruptions.
The new Johor facility is part of Oliver’s commitment to growing globally, with a focus on local support. Across Asia, we have been investing in new capabilities in the last several years to support the medical industry. This includes an ISO-7 converting facility in Suzhou, China as well as a fully-equipped technical lab in Singapore to collaborate with customers on packaging design, innovation, testing, and troubleshooting. We also recently expanded our operations in the Netherlands.
Since then, we have been looking for ways to expand our global footprint, and localize our supply chain in each region where we supply our customers. The opening of the new Johor facility really reinforces our foot print in major Asian markets. Since we have a sales office and a design center in Singapore, the proximity to the vibrant biopharmaceutical and medical device hubs here creates more opportunity to collaborate with companies located in this region. Our Johor facility is launched exclusively to serve market demands in the region.
The Malaysian Investment Development Authority, Invest Johor, and the Iskandar Regional Development Authority, as well as our esteemed network of suppliers and partners, played a crucial role in bringing this facility to life.
CEO, Michael: Oliver supplies packaging materials to businesses that produce medical devices, biopharmaceuticals, and diagnostics, many of which are expanding their global and regional footprint. We’ve always wanted to be closer to where our customers are, but the COVID-19 pandemic really convinced us to accelerate our efforts. We’ve successfully invested and achieved in a five-year period from 2021, what we originally planned to do over a ten-year period in terms of our global expansion. The pandemic also highlighted the vulnerabilities of the industry’s global supply chain, and as a precautionary measure to prevent shortages of critical medical solutions during any unprecedented situations, we have been focused on regionalizing supply chains.
The new Malaysia facility marks a new chapter in our Asia-Pacific business. The 120,000 square foot manufacturing facility is the largest of our plants in the region, and is a testament to our commitment to serving the Asia-Pacific market with proven quality and exceptional service.
Our investments are clearly designed for long-term goals. For the Johor facility, we are focused on ensuring that this site runs smoothly to meet the needs of our customers in Asia-Pacific. It has significant room for growth in capacity, and we anticipate ramping up capacity to a greater degree to meet customer needs by the end of 2026.
The facility represents a significant investment for our business, and we are looking forward to serving our customers in the region in the years to come.
CEO, Michael: Asia-Pacific is rapidly emerging as a med-tech hub, and Malaysia stands out as a key manufacturing center, housing the highest concentration of medical device manufacturing sites in the region. With this new facility, we are poised to become an even stronger link in the regional supply chain of critical health care products, reinforcing our commitment to delivering packaging solutions that our customers and patients can rely on.
The new manufacturing facility will create various roles across quality, engineering, logistics and supply chain, and build resilience in Oliver’s regional operations. In addition, we plan to expand our warehousing space, which will result in a larger workforce.
Sustainability is an increasingly important component of our strategy, and we've integrated environmentally responsible processes and materials into this facility, aiming to control our carbon footprint and foster a culture of environmental stewardship.
Our Johor facility includes rainwater harvesting, energy-saving LED lights, and electric vehicle charging stations. We believe in embedding circular practices into our operations as much as possible, and we strive to optimize the materials and packaging configurations for our customers so they are using the appropriate amount of material, at the same time reducing wastage. By reducing packaging material, we can be more efficient with our operations, and to track our environmental footprint we also aim to create science-based targets that will help us to benchmark and track against our sustainability goals.
APAC-GM, Kenneth: The next phase for our operations in Asia Pacific will be shifting from the development of infrastructure to innovation. We anticipate that this facility will take time to operate at full capacity, and we plan to support customer productivity and regulatory efforts in this diverse regional market at every step of the way. We are also investing in R&D to stabilize our future goals.
For the past five years, our company has been focused on globalizing, establishing manufacturing facilities and expanding our footprint where we need them to be. The next stage for us is to invest in innovation and R&D, in order to reflect our priorities of reducing waste, improving efficiency and ensuring product integrity and sterility. We aim to continue developing products that will serve a wider market, and innovating to solve different problems in the industry.
CEO, Michael: This new facility is internationally certified, with ISO13845 and ISO 7 & 8 Cleanroom certifications, as are all our facilities globally, and will adhere to the highest quality and standards. We operate just like a medical device company in terms of being industry-compliant, and we place great importance on getting our solutions validated, so that our products help to meet our customers’ regulatory compliance requirements.
As a sterile barrier expert for over 50 years, we have developed strong expertise in the design of packaging to support and address gaps in demand in the healthcare industry. This new facility is built to those same exacting standards and has the scale to serve a very large medical device community, an emerging biopharmaceutical market and diagnostics industry.
Furthermore, our technical team is very active in educating our customers through knowledge-driven initiatives explaining how medical device packaging standards are applied.
We have witnessed tremendous growth in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries in the region, and our new capabilities in Johor aim to handle the growing demand from our customers across a wider geography in Asia-Pacific with a more resilient supply chain.
