May 2026
The Operations Brief
Béres Gyógyszergyár
Four opportunities to recover margin. A starting point for what we believe is a larger conversation.
By Lightbloom · An AI Operating Partner
Potential savings: €580K-1.0M per year
Four years · FY2020 to FY2024
23.5%
After-tax margin, FY2020
HUF 4.7B profit
-1.8%
After-tax margin, FY2024
Second consecutive loss year
Revenue over the same four years moved less than five percent. Every point of margin between these two figures was absorbed by the cost base.
Fig. 1 · After-tax profit · EUR million · FY2020-FY2024
Béres Gyógyszergyár is Hungary's largest privately-owned OTC pharmaceutical manufacturer, three decades into the same family ownership, market leader across five product categories at home and growing across twenty export markets. A new external CEO took over in September 2024 after two consecutive operating losses. The cost base he inherited was built for a different revenue and input-cost environment.
Four key opportunities identified.
Assembled from public sources only: Hungarian commercial registry filings, company press releases, industry coverage, and regulatory databases. Lightbloom has seen no internal data.
What is visible from the outside is typically 40-60% of what a full operational review surfaces once we have access to ERP data, functional headcount, and process detail. The opportunities below are conservative and defensible from public evidence. The picture from inside is larger.
1
Opportunity One
Plan the SKU, not the shift
How a production scheduling AI agent reads ERP and the new automated warehouse, turning days of manual planning into a reviewed weekly plan across 244 SKUs.
Finding
Béres manufactures 244 SKUs across five distinct production technologies at the Szolnok facility: direct compression tableting, film-coating, hard gel capsule filling, liquid filling, and gummy vitamins. The November 2023 expansion added a robotic Béres Drops production line and an automated 6,000-pallet warehouse. The physical infrastructure has been modernised. The planning layer that decides what gets made, when, and in what sequence has not been redesigned to match it.
The plant was automated in 2023. The plan for what runs on it was not.
Our Solution
Daily planning is judgment-heavy at 244 SKUs with pronounced seasonal demand: immune products peak in autumn and winter, children's vitamins in September, Vitamin D year-round and growing. A planner cross-references demand forecasts, line capacity, batch sizes, and changeover costs by hand across hundreds of SKU-line combinations. The R&D lab opened in November 2023 adds new SKUs every quarter. A scheduling AI agent reads sales orders and inventory from ERP, models seasonality per SKU, and outputs a weekly production plan per line with batch validation and changeover sequencing built in. The planner approves. The calculation across 244 SKUs that today takes hours does not.
Estimated annual value
01 / 04
€150-300K
per year
1-2% reduction in production waste and overtime on a ~€19-22M manufacturing COGS base. Conservative ceiling applied for GMP batch validation constraints that limit scheduling flexibility relative to non-pharma manufacturing.
2
Opportunity Two
Buy at the market, not the renewal
How a procurement intelligence layer reads ERP purchase history against live vitamin, excipient, and packaging benchmarks, recovering four years of contract drift.
Finding
Béres buys vitamin and mineral raw materials priced in EUR and USD, excipients from European chemical manufacturers, and packaging from blister foil to carton board. Revenue fell 4.5% in nominal terms from FY2020 to FY2024. After-tax profit moved from €12M to a loss of €0.9M. The forint weakened approximately 12% against the EUR over the same period, which means every EUR-priced input automatically cost Béres 12% more in HUF without any change in the EUR price. Contracts that were priced in 2019 and 2020 and rolled forward have not been benchmarked against current market alternatives.
The contract was right when it was signed. The market has moved four years since.
Our Solution
GMP qualified supplier rules mean active pharmaceutical ingredients cannot be switched freely. They say nothing about packaging and excipients, which account for roughly 35% of the total materials base. A procurement intelligence layer ingests purchase orders and invoices from ERP, maps each material to its market reference using commodity index feeds and European distributor pricing databases, and surfaces where contracted prices exceed the benchmark. Quarterly: a briefing pack showing the top materials by overpayment, annual saving if repriced, and next contract renewal date. The procurement team negotiates with the data in front of them.
Estimated annual value
02 / 04
€150-250K
per year
2-3% improvement on €5.3-6.3M of addressable packaging and excipients spend, plus 0.5 FTE of procurement admin freed through automated benchmarking. GMP-constrained APIs excluded from the year-one base.
3
Opportunity Three
Generate the document, not the file chain
How an export operations layer pre-populates documents and consolidates distributor reporting across 20+ markets, replacing email and attachments with one view.
Finding
Béres exports to more than twenty countries with two wholly-owned subsidiaries in Romania and Ukraine and named distribution agreements in the UK, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Romania via Richter. Exports now exceed a quarter of revenue and are growing. Each market has its own commercial terms, currency, regulatory classification, distributor relationship, and documentation requirement. The UK partnership alone classifies Béres's calcium-D3 product as a licensed prescription medicine, which changes the paperwork entirely from the OTC documentation used in every other market.
Twenty markets compounding. The coordination function has never been redesigned.
Our Solution
This function runs on email, spreadsheets, and shared drives because dedicated export management software sized for a business at this scale does not exist off the shelf. Three workflows built on the existing stack address the volume. Document generation: commercial invoices, certificates of conformity, and health certificates pre-populated from order data, approved by the export team rather than drafted from scratch. Distributor reporting: inbound sell-through reports from all markets parsed into one normalised view regardless of format. Currency monitoring: a rule layer watching HUF against RON, CZK, PLN, and GBP, with automatic alerts when moves exceed agreed thresholds and the affected market's last price-list update date shown alongside.
Estimated annual value
03 / 04
€200-300K
per year
1.5-2.5 FTE freed via document and reporting automation on a 6-8 FTE export coordination function. Plus reduction in external customs documentation costs and rework from documentation errors across 20+ active markets.
4
Opportunity Four
Three entities, three currencies, one pack
How an automated finance consolidation AI agent delivers a live management pack to the new CEO within 24 hours of period close, eliminating 1-2 FTE-months of manual assembly per year.
Finding
Béres operates three legal entities: Hungary reporting in HUF, Romania in RON, and Ukraine in UAH. A new external CEO with a commercial and marketing background took operational control in September 2024, replacing a 24-year incumbent. The monthly consolidated management pack that tells him how the group is performing across all three entities is almost certainly assembled manually each month: figures pulled from each accounting system, translated at spot rates, inter-company transactions stripped out, and formatted into a board-level view. Private companies that grew through reinvestment rather than professional finance infrastructure accumulate this pattern without anyone redesigning it.
Three entities. The monthly pack assembled by hand.
Our Solution
A finance consolidation AI agent connects to each entity's accounting system, pulls monthly actuals on a scheduled basis, applies current FX rates from a live feed, eliminates inter-company transactions, and outputs a consistent management pack. The CFO reviews and approves. The AI agent handles the assembly. The new CEO receives the same consolidated view within 24 hours of period close rather than five to seven days after, on a template that does not change month to month. Ukraine operations are excluded from phase one given current disruption; the Hungary-Romania consolidation alone delivers the majority of the value.
Estimated annual value
04 / 04
€80-180K
per year
3-5 FTE-days per monthly close automated across a three-entity group with currency translation. Lower bound applies if Ukraine operations remain partially suspended. Upper bound adds ad-hoc reporting requests currently handled manually by finance staff.
Before anything else
We validate the numbers first. Then we build.
Nothing here becomes a commitment until the math is validated against Béres's actual ERP and procurement data. If the numbers hold, Lightbloom builds the fixes specific to Béres's stack. They are AI agent workflows running on Yield, the AI operating platform we build and use internally, and they keep running. We earn 20% of Confirmed Annual Value per opportunity, once, after the savings land in Béres's accounts. Nothing before that.
-
Week 1
01 / 04
ERP & systems landing
Read-only extraction from Béres's ERP, the automated warehouse system installed in November 2023, and each entity's accounting system. Data quality assessed against all four opportunity workstreams. No process changes proposed yet.
-
Week 2
02 / 04
Top materials benchmark
Pull the last 24 months of purchase orders and invoices for packaging and excipients. Map against commodity indices and European distributor pricing. Surface the materials where the current contract sits above market. Rank by annual savings opportunity.
-
Week 3
03 / 04
SKU planning model + export pilot
Take the top 20 SKUs by volume. Model demand seasonality from sales history. Compare against the past quarter's actual planning decisions to validate the model. In parallel, map export documentation requirements for Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and the UK.
-
Week 4
04 / 04
Joint readout · commitment
Baseline aligned against Béres's actual books. Scope and sequencing of the build agreed. The engagement begins or it does not. Both ends are honest.
Together, four opportunities
Opportunity One
€150-300K
Opportunity Two
€150-250K
Opportunity Three
€200-300K
Opportunity Four
€80-180K
· sum ·
€580K-1.0M
per year, recurring
Identifiable from public sources only. The four weeks will confirm whether it holds. Internal access reveals what public sources cannot.
Where this goes next
A thirty-minute call. Nothing more until it is mutual.
We walk through the brief together: your reactions, what we got wrong, what we missed. If the four-week diagnostic still makes sense at the end, we scope it. If not, we shake hands. Lightbloom only earns when Béres does.