The plant received maintenance and waits for the raw material to restart production. Photo: Yoan Pérez/Escambray

The Mathisa sanitary pad factory, in Sancti Spíritus, has been on a production pause since the end of January due to the deficit of raw materials, specifically the polyethylene with which one of the faces of these hygienic pads is coated to waterproof them.

"All the raw materials we use are imported and in the first months of the year we had limitations with financing, but they have already approved it, negotiations with suppliers have been finalized and now we are waiting for them to be manufactured," Ángel Pozo González, director of this Base Business Unit, told Escambray.

Ángel Pozo González, director of the Mathisa Sanitary Hygienic Material Base Business Unit. Photo: Yoan Pérez/Escambray

According to his forecasts, by July these products should arrive in the country in a staggered manner – because they arrive from different markets, as distant as Mexico and Finland – and the plant is ready to immediately start producing, even with three work shifts, to achieve the 4,500,000 packages planned in this 2023.

"In January, before stopping, we managed to produce 560,000 packages, a figure close to what we had planned for the first quarter of the year, and we consumed one hundred percent of the raw material we had in the warehouses because there was a deficit of the product and we tried to advance the delivery cycles.

"The distribution is executed by Encomed, but as far as I know they have already distributed it and they do not have availability of this product," said Pozo González.

The three plants of this type that exist in the country present a similar panorama, which has forced – at least in Sancti Spíritus – to relocate more than 50 of its workers outside the Unit, to leave another 40 interrupts and to maintain in Mathisa only twenty to preserve the vitality of the factory, which during this mandatory shutdown already received maintenance.

However, the deficit of the intimate Mariposa, which are usually marketed here in the pharmacy network, could persist throughout the year because that figure is well below the number of pads that were traditionally manufactured in this industry: between 10 and 14 million packages.

In the Spiritus plant they usually make six different assortments of intimate Mariposa. Photo: Yoan Pérez/Escambray

In the Spiritus plant, which supplies the provinces from Matanzas to Las Tunas, they usually make six different assortments of intimate Mariposa, two of which are delivered for sale in pharmacy and the others are destined to the electronic commerce of the Caribe and Cimex store chains.

Despite the fact that the pads demand nine imported raw materials, which not infrequently take time to arrive in the country due to the well-known obstacles of the blockade, during the last four years the collective has not stopped fulfilling its productive planning.

(Taken from Escambray)

In video, Mathisa Sancti Spíritus on pause

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