The Antares Vision story begins in 2007 when Emidio Zorzella and Massimo Bonardi, friends since the university years at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and united by great passion and energy, see in vision systems a way to check the quality and offer safer products to consumer: they found Antares Vision.
The company quickly becomes a supplier to pharmaceutical multinationals and thanks to the ability to adapt to new regulations, it establishes itself as a global leader in traceability starting the story of innovation and global expansion. In ten years Antares Vision Group (AV Group) went from being up-and-coming start up to a multinational company with 350 employees in the headquarters and 7 branches worldwide.
The growth is continuous: in 2019 the trading of ordinary shares and warrants on AIM Italia (Alternative Capital Market) officially begins at Borsa Italiana, Stock Exchange in Milan. Just some months later, thanks to several company acquisitions, the Group starts to expand its expertise and offer in new areas, starting to explore Food, Beverage and Cosmetics worlds.
Today they are a global Group successfully pursuing a deep integration of expertise, with different talent, technologies and solutions under the same roof, in sign of cooperation and innovation.
HISTORY OF ANTARES VISION
- 1990s: It all begins when Emidio Zorzella and Massimo Bonardi first meet at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Together, they write a graduation thesis on optical measurement systems.
- 2007: After some experiences, they see in vision systems a way to offer safer products to consumers. Antares Vision is founded. Antares Vision quickly become a supplier to pharmaceutical multinationals, establishing itself as a global leader in traceability.
- 2013: Antares Vision open the first foreign offices in the United States and Brazil – the main regions in the pharmaceutical industry.
- 2017: Ten years of Antares Vision. From a start up to a multinational company with 350 employees in the headquarters and 7 branches worldwide.
- 2019: Antares Vision on the Italian Stock Market: The trading of ordinary shares and warrants on AIM Italia (Alternative Capital Market) officially began at Borsa Italiana, Stock Exchange in Milan.
- 2019: New company acquisitions permit Antares Vision to expand its offer in new areas. It is the beginning of a new life, with the exploration of Food, Beverage and Cosmetics world.
- 2021: Antares Vision continues its growth with new company acquisitions and becomes Antares Vision Group
- Today: AV Group is a global Group successfully pursuing a deep integration of expertise, with different talent, technologies and solutions under the same roof.
Antares Vision Group is a technological partner of excellence in digitalization and innovation for companies and institutions, to guarantee the safety of products and people, the competitiveness of businesses and protection of the planet. It offers a unique and complete ecosystem of technologies to guarantee product quality (inspection systems and machines) and product traceability along the supply chain (from raw materials, to production, from distribution to the consumer), with integrated management of data, production, and the supply chain, also through the application of artificial intelligence and the use of blockchain. Antares Vision Group is active in the life sciences sector (pharmaceuticals, biomedical devices, and hospitals), in food and beverage, in cosmetics and is expanding into other sectors.
Emidio Zorzella, Chairman and Co-CEO of Antares Vision Group, sums up the several projects led (and about to be led) by the multinational company based in Travagliato (Brescia), Italy.
As Emidio Zorzella states, the mission of Antares Vision Group is to accelerate technological innovation and digitalization to ensure transparency, safety and sustainability of products and supply chains to protect brands and customers. “Our technologies – adds Zorzella – were established to guarantee the high quality, safety of products in favor of end-to-end customers and brand protection”.
Antares Vision Group’s expertise has been built starting from the pharma industry, which is very demanding and needs a lot of advanced technologies and solutions to perform their controls, regulated in different ways by different countries.
Antares Vision tough is supplier to other pivotal industries: Cosmetics, Food, Beverage, Chemicals, and Rigid Containers. In particular, talking about Food, Emidio Zorzella mentions that AV Group has developed a platform for one of the most crucial sectors for people’s health: the Agri-food.
In August 2021, Antares Vision Group signed an agreement with three strategic partners: Bf SPA (holding company of Bonifiche Ferraresi), Bluarancio Spa, an Information Technology company specialized in the creation and management of platforms for the Italian agricultural sector, and Sdf Spa, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of tractors, collection and diesel engines – for the start-up of RurAll Spa.
RurAll Spa is committed in the ecological and digital transition of the agri-food system. The project involves the creation of a digital infrastructure of rural territories, by exploiting digital technologies to increase the yield and land management on a large scale and/or provide advisory services focused on the digitalisation and/or development of DSS platforms and software and other systems for data analysis and distribution, known as Agriculture 0, and a digital platform, which by adopting emerging technologies such as IOT, AI, Big data and Blockchains, for the end-to-end traceability of agrifood products, from the origins of the raw materials, their progression through the supply chain, to the final consumer, with a view to enabling the introduction of a “smart label” able to certify authentic “made in Italy” products, and the sustainability of the entire supply chain and of the production and distribution processes, from a social, economic and environmental perspective (with clear pre-established criteria on the ingredients used and on the main characteristics that the supply chain must have, especially in terms of value distribution and the use of manpower, in order to obtain the issue of the “made in Italy” guarantee).
Furthermore, Antares Vision Group has developed a Digital Healthcare innovative solution for automating drug and medical device logistics, which eliminates or reduces activities that do not generate value for the patient while introducing a new paradigm of process efficiency for healthcare providers.
The Medication Management Platform (MMP) eliminates non-value-added activities that can help hospital systems optimize the time of medical and nursing resources to focus on patient and patient safety. The Medication Management Platform allows the complete traceability of the flow of medicines and medical devices, combined with automation systems that can help improve efficiency and operational excellence within healthcare institutions.
The combination of automation systems and traceability allows for the better management of reorders and stocks, both at the central and peripheral level, avoiding the waste of materials due to expiration.
The MMP is a single, interconnected platform designed to implement the full end-to-end traceability of drugs and medical devices inside the hospital; to allow the complete visibility of processes; to track therapy workflows for enhanced patient safety.
These projects are mirroring in the financial results of Antares Vision Group. Emidio Zorzella comments: “In the first half of 2022 Antares Vision Group recorded an important increase both in terms of sales and orders despite several challenges: the continuing health emergency, difficulties in procuring electronic components, higher logistics costs and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. We were able to continue our growth thanks to the strength of our business vision, as an innovation and digitalization enabler, representing a valid option to meet markets, supply chains, governments and institutions’ needs, consistent with the consumer trends. Also based on 1H22 orders up 31%, we are confident in confirming FY22 revenues guidance, with an increase in Net Consolidated Sales between +12% and +18% on FY 2021 stated numbers, excluding acquisitions executed during the year.
In 1H 2022, the Life Science business area reached 61% (+15% YoY) of total net consolidated revenues, while the FMCG business area (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods, as food, beverage, cosmetics) was 39% (+10% YoY). At business model level, in 1H 2022, the significant growth posted in Services and SaaS (together +73% YoY) strengthens the positioning of Antares Vision Group in data management through digital innovation; these recurring revenues, with higher profit margins, now represent 44% of total turnover vs. 28% achieved in 1H 2021 and against 31% in FY2021.”
Regarding this, Massimo Bonardi, Co-CEO of Antares Vision Group, commented: “Antares Vision Group will continue to pursue its growth strategy with a view to consolidating its leadership. This will also be achieved thanks to a reorganisation of the group and a unique and distinctive positioning of its ecosystem which, through the integration and interconnection of various technologies, is able to manage all the data of supply chains: from raw materials, through production and distribution, up to the final consumer, to ensure transparency for all players in the supply chain.”
In the last months, Antares Vision Group has become the technological partner in three research and innovation projects funded by the European Union, through the NextGenerationEU programme, worth a total of approximately €900 million. The projects are part of the most recent programme sponsored by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, the strategic objective of which is to create “national champions” of research and development in certain “Key Enabling Technologies”, as part of the “National Recovery and Resilience Plan – NRRP”, funded by the European Union within the NextGenerationEU programme.
To accomplish these projects – commented Emidio Zorzella – the Group provides its know-how, expertise and ecosystem of its technology solutions: from traceability, inspection for quality control, to integrated data management also with the application of artificial intelligence. The aim is to provide a technology platform to ensure the safety, transparency, efficiency and sustainability of products, processes and supply chains.
The added value of these partnerships – Zorzella concludes – is the ability to create a system between businesses and outstanding Entities through technology, aimed at ensuring innovation for people’s health and safety and thus a better quality of life.
In the Life Science sector, the Group has signed an agreement, as founder, for the “Development of gene therapy and drugs with RNA technology” with the National Research Centre based in Padua, with funding of €400 million. The Centre, established in collaboration with the University of Brescia, has the two-fold objective of increasing the technological know-how needed to design and provide RNA-based medicines, and for gene therapy, and to identify promising candidate drugs and genes in five main disease areas: genetic diseases, cancer, metabolic-cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases and inflammatory-infectious diseases. Once up and running, the Research Centre is envisaged to reach a production capacity of up to 250-300 drugs per year dedicated to gene therapy.
In the AgriTech sector, Antares Vision Group has signed an agreement with the National Research Centre for “Agricultural – Agritech Technologies” at the University of Naples Federico II, with funding of €477 million. The aim of the Centre is to work to increase sustainable productivity, to meet food safety requirements and to reduce the environmental impact in variable climatic conditions, through five research objectives: resilience (to improve sustainable productivity and to promote resilience to climate change), low impact (to reduce waste and environmental impact), circularity (to develop circular economy strategies), recovery (the sustainable development of marginal areas), traceability (to promote safety, traceability and authenticity in agrifood supply chains).
Lastly, in the Digital Healthcare segment, the Italian multinational has signed an agreement with the University of Brescia and Dompè Farmaceutici to develop an integrated system of healthcare infrastructure, which will extend the Multi-sector Technological Service Centre of the Nord University Campus by around 2,000 square metres, with a view to developing healthcare technologies of the future. The project stems from a public and private sector partnership called LIGHT (Lifescience Innovation Good Healthcare Technology), which has collected over €19.5 million in funds.
To conclude, Massimo Bonardi states that “The Group will keep moving forward with its growth strategy, aimed at consolidating its leadership, also due to the group’s new organisation and the unique, distinctive positioning of its ecosystem which, thanks to the integration and interconnection of technologies, manages all the data of the supply chains, from the origin to the end consumer, to guarantee transparency to all players.”
Micaela Orizio, Marketing Communications Director, Antares Vision Group
“Antares Vision Group opens growth opportunities (in business, in professionalism, in planning): today the new organizational structure represents a step forward in this path. A customer-centric approach to business areas (Life Science, Cosmetics, Food, Beverage, Chemicals, Rigid Containers) and, within each business area, an ecosystem of technologies managed by each product unit: Inspection, Track and Trace, Digital Factory, Supply Chain Transparency, Service.
The Group set-up is designed as a matrix, so the result is greater than the sum of every single part: what we can offer and achieve, as a Group, to our customers is not only the resolution of their pains and needs but also a contribution to evolve and innovate their business and vision, through the digitalization of products and supply chains.
We offer a unique and distinctive ecosystem of solutions to guarantee the quality of products, packaging, and containers, the safety of products and supply chains through traceability and brand protection, the sustainability of production processes, and the monitoring of environmental impact.
This ecosystem, based on our product and solutions portfolio, unveils opportunities for new business in every industry we serve, from inspection to track and trace to supply chain transparency. It also leverages our existing customer base in a “win-win” strategy that will build our business, lead digital innovation, and strengthen our positioning as a technology partner for innovation to build long-lasting relationships.”
