Meet The First Covid Testing Billionaire
Swabs for Covid testing made Copan CEO Stefania Triva a billionaire. However, regardless of numerous buyout gives, she’s snubbing the dealmakers and holding the corporate firmly within the household.
On a foggy early January day within the northern Italian metropolis of Brescia, which was hit laborious by the primary wave of Covid-19 in 2020, Stefania Triva, 57, units out two swabs facet by facet on her desk. One is an everyday cotton Q-tip, the opposite a particular “flocked” swab, studded with tiny artificial fibers that resemble break up ends.
That particular swab—made by her household’s 43-year-old firm, Copan—is the important thing ingredient in a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 PCR assessments at present being plunged into noses around the globe. Sitting in entrance of a big red-and-yellow summary portray and a corkboard crammed with images of her three kids, Triva delves into the delicate variations that make her flocked swabs the gold commonplace.
“In a cotton swab, the fibers are twisted across the stick, making a cage that traps the pattern,” she says, pointing to the thickly wound Q-tip. “However it solely releases 20% of that pattern. In a flocked swab, due to the mechanics of how the fibers are connected to the stick, you will have the alternative: 80% is launched.”
These swabs—invented by Copan in 2003 and the topic of ongoing litigation with its main rival, Maine-based Puritan Medical Merchandise—have helped drive the corporate’s huge progress; it manufactured 415 million of them in 2020, greater than double the 2019 quantity.
After ramping up manufacturing, Copan now has the capability to supply 1 billion a 12 months. Web earnings almost quintupled in 2020, to $79 million, on income of $372 million. It blew previous that determine in 2021, with gross sales rising to $445 million. (Web earnings was not but accessible at press time.) A full 84% of Copan’s gross sales come from flocked swabs, which have been utilized in not less than a billion molecular assessments carried out in physician’s workplaces and clinics around the globe for the reason that starting of the pandemic. (That determine doesn’t embody swabs for speedy assessments or at-home kits, a tiny fraction of Copan’s enterprise.)
“We love being free, eclectic and quick, figuring out that we generally must take calculated dangers.”
That success has elevated Triva, who holds a 48% stake in Copan, into the billionaire ranks, value an estimated $1.2 billion. 5 different members of the family personal the remainder of the agency, which Forbes values at one other $1.3 billion.
Copan’s runaway success has attracted the eye of a number of funding funds—Triva received’t title them—however the daughter of the corporate’s founder has no intention of promoting. “We obtain gives nearly day-after-day,” she admits. Confirms her nephew and Copan’s 32-year-old inheritor obvious, Giorgio Triva: “We’re at a measurement just like different companies being sought out by these funds.”
However regardless of the SPAC increase and the proliferation of IPOs each at dwelling and overseas—together with the New York Inventory Alternate itemizing in July of Stevanato Group, one other Italian family-owned agency that obtained a Covid increase due to its vials for vaccines—she doesn’t plan to faucet the general public markets.
“If you’re a public firm . . . it constrains your technique and determination making,” she says. “We’re financially stable and impartial, and this enables us to develop with out in search of exterior funding.”
The expansion of the previous two years means Copan can proceed increasing whereas holding possession firmly inside the household. “We love being free, eclectic and quick, figuring out that we generally must take calculated dangers,” Triva says.
Meaning investing in a future past the pandemic. Along with medical assessments, the agency additionally makes specialised swabs utilized in gathering forensic DNA from crime scenes. Shoppers run the gamut from Scotland Yard to the French Gendarmerie, which used Copan-made swabs to assist establish the perpetrators of the 2015 Paris terrorist assaults. A microswab Copan and the Gendarmerie developed collectively permits authorities to investigate DNA from any bodily fluid—and even simply fingerprints—in beneath two hours.
Past swabs, Copan already has a high-tech, and sure extra profitable, product to supply: an entire suite of machines and software program that automates a lot of lab processing, from routine urine assessments to advanced bacterial infections. Lab automation, with $5 billion a 12 months in income, is doubtlessly a a lot greater market than swabs.
“We’ve made some improvements in automation which have revolutionized microbiology,” Triva says, glancing over the huge warehouses and factories outdoors the window of her workplace.
Copan was based within the northern Italian metropolis of Mantua in 1979 by Triva’s father, Giorgio Triva. It initially distributed solely lab merchandise others made, equivalent to check tubes. The corporate started making swabs in 1982, the identical 12 months Stefania’s older brother Daniele, a chemical engineer, joined the household agency as normal supervisor.
Buoyed by robust product gross sales—together with assortment cups for blood evaluation machines that gained a foothold in Japan—Copan expanded abroad, opening a subsidiary in California in 1995. Three years later it moved to its present location in Brescia, a significant manufacturing hub.
Daniele Triva took over after his father’s dying in 2000, and Copan’s fortunes modified perpetually when he pioneered the now-ubiquitous flocked swabs in 2003. Whereas out searching for a winter coat, Daniele observed how the nylon fiber strips on garments hangers caught carefully to the material, and he questioned if it might be replicated in swabs. He challenged his technicians to design a swab with adhesive fibers that might act like a sponge and launch extra pattern materials than an everyday Q-tip might—promising them free pizza in the event that they succeeded.
They did, and the brand new know-how they produced revolutionized diagnostics, making it simpler to conduct routine assessments for viruses and bacterial infections alike. “Earlier than flocked swabs, they used aluminum wires to take nasal samples,” says Triva, grimacing.
Over the subsequent decade, Copan expanded its California plant and opened an workplace in Shanghai. It started investing in automation in 2007, making proprietary machines known as “walk-away specimen processors,” which robotically course of 1000’s of samples a day, 24/7.
Beginning in 2012, Copan turned embroiled in a patent infringement battle with its largest competitor, Puritan Medical Merchandise, after the American agency began producing its personal flocked swabs. Copan alleges Puritan is violating a number of of its patents. The authorized battle has raged for a decade and reveals no indicators of abating, with victories and defeats registered in courts from Maine to Germany and Sweden.
“They’ve at all times been our ‘unlawful’ competitor,” Triva says. The continuing lawsuit in opposition to Puritan within the U.S. District Court docket for the District of Maine was stayed in Might 2020 to permit the 2 companies to focus full-time on making swabs through the pandemic; the litigation has since resumed. Puritan denies the allegations however declined to remark for this text.
A heartbreaking growth occurred in 2014, when Daniele died at 54 after a seven-month battle with most cancers. Stefania, who began working on the firm proper out of school and had been director of high quality assurance and regulatory affairs, stepped up.
“It was a really tragic interval . . . however I by no means considered giving up,” she says, taking a second to breathe. “The one doubt I had was about our skill to go on, as a result of my brother was an important chief. So I met with all our longtime workers and issued a name to arms. I instructed them, ‘We are able to solely do that collectively.’ ”
Beneath her management, Copan hasn’t stopped shifting. The corporate established a brand new engineering facility close to its headquarters in 2016 and later opened new workplaces and factories in Japan, Australia and Puerto Rico. However nothing ready Triva, or the corporate, for the virulent wave of Covid-19 that washed over Italy in early 2020. The primary case within the nation was identified on February 20 within the small city of Codogno, about 50 miles southwest of Brescia—naturally, with a Copan-made flocked swab.
Dealing with a nationwide emergency, Copan positioned its workers on nonstop seven-day shifts to fulfill the Italian authorities’s demand for testing swabs. It additionally ramped up manufacturing to supply much-needed provides to the USA, with U.S. Air Pressure planes touchdown in Brescia late that March and into April to select up a complete of 4 million swabs.
“Brescia was massacred by Covid-19, however our workers have been at all times there,” Triva says, recalling a interval when the town of 200,000 and the encircling province have been recording dozens of Covid-related deaths a day. “All you possibly can hear was ambulance sirens, however they stored working, even on weekends and holidays.”
The corporate employed a whole lot of latest staff to maintain up with the extraordinary surge in demand. It additionally obtained two grants for $10 million apiece in 2020, one from Apple’s Superior Manufacturing Fund to construct a brand new California plant, the opposite from the U.S. Division of Protection to extend manufacturing at its Puerto Rico manufacturing facility.
It additionally doubled down on robotics, launching a machine known as UniVerse that automates the preparation of samples for medical assessments—for Covid-19 but in addition different infectious ailments together with tuberculosis—liberating up overworked lab technicians to concentrate on much less menial duties.
Copan’s newest innovation is a machine that cuts prognosis time by 80% for infections attributable to antibiotic-resistant micro organism. Constructed-in synthetic intelligence helps maintain the system operating easily. Exams could be accomplished in roughly 4 hours, and unfavorable samples are routinely despatched to the trash.
Already the technique appears to be working: Copan WASP, the agency’s automation division, recorded $54 million in income within the first 9 months of 2021, up 39% over the earlier 12 months and exceeding its haul for all of 2020; it now makes up almost a fifth of general gross sales, the corporate says.
Triva credit her crew, and her brother’s legacy, with that success: “[Daniele] sowed an entrepreneurial tradition,” she says, “not simply to me, however to the entire firm.” And so long as she’s in cost, that custom, and Copan itself, will stay all within the household.
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