Our second day started off bright and early with an 8am bus ride down to Limassol, to visit the headquarters of Medochemie, a pharmaceutical company. There, I learned about their quality assurance and supply chain. Quality assurance is especially important for them since they are a drug manufacturing company, so making sure their standards are being met at every step of the process, from raw materials to the finished drug and then to the customer, is crucial so that the customer receives the exact treatment that they need. Medochemie does this by following Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) throughout the company, which is similar to the FDA in the U.S. Without GMP, severe consequences can affect customers, as shown with the examples we were given during the lecture.

Additionally, we discussed how ongoing events in our world today like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine affects the supply chain of companies like Medochemie. During the initial phase of COVID when all air transport was stopped, Medochemie had to find a different way to transport their products into Europe and the rest of the world, so they decided to use their hub in Greece as a buffer for the transport of their products. Using Greece as a buffer was beneficial as it allowed for transport by land. Also, the war in Ukraine limited access to most of Europe’s oil supply, which made it more expensive to transport products. Combined with COVID’s disruption of supply chains, things became more costly, and delivery of materials became extremely backed up. These factors made it difficult to accurately plan areas like customer demand and product delivery in the supply chain for Medochemie. Additionally, a business practice that I think is more of a factor for Medochemie than American companies is that they have to account for major language differences since their products are sold across the world. After the lecture, we toured one of Medochemie’s warehouses, which was cool to see.

After the visit at Medochemie, we headed back up to Nicosia and had lunch at the University of Nicosia (UNIC). The food was pretty good, yet something that differed from Pitt and most colleges in the U.S. was that after you got your food you had to pay for it, rather than having a meal plan covering the cost. We then had a break at UNIC before executives from Wargaming, an online video game maker, arrived at the university for our second company “visit” of the day.

During the Wargaming lecture, I learned about how they change their marketing appropriately for each region of the world. For example, in Japan and other countries in East Asia, flashy marketing works best, while in Europe, marketing focusing on the historical aspect of the games works best. Additionally, I learned about their process for making their games; from the idea phase, to see if there is a market for the game, if Wargaming has the ability to produce the game, to prototyping using rough code, and finally to the alpha and beta stages of the game before final production. Also, I learned about the issue of “feature creep” where game designers continue to add features which could lead to an overcomplicated and an expensive game. Lastly, since Wargaming is an online gaming company, they want to be in as many markets as possible. Therefore, they included Chinese tanks in their games so that their game is available to play in China, whereas many other Western games are not, giving them an advantage over other gaming companies. Overall, it was an interesting day learning about the two companies.