GMR Hyderabad International Airport Limited & GMR Hyderabad Air Cargo and Dubai Airports have come together to build an exclusive Vaccine Air Freight Corridor Product ‘HYDXB-VAXCOR,’ a global vaccine corridor to pave the way for worldwide distribution of vaccines.

This assumes importance in the backdrop of Hyderabad being a major vaccine manufacturing hub and playing a major role in manufacture and supply of vaccines for distribution globally.

A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed by Pradeep Panicker, CEO-GMR Hyderabad International Airport, Saurabh Kumar, CEO-GMR Hyderabad Air Cargo and Eugene Barry, EVP-Commercial, Dubai Airports Corporation, in a virtual ceremony organised last week.

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Together, they will prioritise the temperature-sensitive vaccine shipments moving between GMR Hyderabad and Dubai Airports for further connections to various continents for vaccine customers and logistics stakeholders.

Dubai Airports has identified GMR-HYD as a key strategic air cargo partner to leverage its global distribution eco-system and GMR-HYD will leverage Dubai Airport to facilitate the global vaccine supply chain.

Pradeep Panicker said, “GMR Hyderabad Air Cargo has always been the preferred gateway for India’s vaccine exports. In the current global context, there is a need for meticulous planning and collaborations to ensure safe and efficient air transportation of Covid-19 vaccines. We have partnered with Dubai Airports to jointly offer global distribution of Covid-19 vaccines. We are significantly upgrading our handling capacities for Covid-19 vaccine shipments requiring cold to ultra-cold temperature ranges and becoming India’s largest air cargo centre, both for exports/imports and domestic distribution of the vaccine.”

SGK Kishore, Executive Director-South & Chief Innovation Officer, GMR Airports, said, “As the world embarks on an unprecedented vaccination drive to combat Covid-19, our collaboration with Dubai Airports will play a key role in enabling seamless, safe and efficient shipment of Covid-19 vaccines to and from Hyderabad, the pharma capital of South Asia.”

“A major surge in demand for the efficient, safe and reliable global distribution of high volumes of Covid-19 vaccines is expected in the coming months and as the world’s pre-eminent hub of choice, we wanted to be ready to respond to and accommodate that demand. Our partnership with GMR-Hyderabad is timed perfectly just as the global race to develop the vaccines enters the final stage. This corridor is the result of our proactive strategy to be ready with innovative, collaborative and agile shipping solutions for the industry,” said Paul Griffiths, CEO of Dubai Airports.

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GMR-HYD is uniquely located in the proximity of several major vaccine producers and is an established hub for export of India-manufactured vaccines to target markets in Europe, Africa, the US and Asia.

GMR-HYD is expanding its facilities and streamlining processes both on landside and airside to meet the unique requirements of handling Covid-19 vaccine. It has already launched a large, custom built Cool Dolly, a mobile refrigerated unit for airside transportation till aircraft maintaining the cold-chain, this year, which is scalable.

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