Nearly three years after raising a record $100 million from private equity funds to expand its presence in multi-specialty expansive hospitals in 5-6 cities in India, Narayana Hrudayalaya is once again tapping the private equity route to expand its presence in the neighbourhood speciality clinics space.
Riding the wave of PE fund raising by Vasan Healthcare, MedPlus and Metropolis, Narayana Hrudayalaya is looking to raise $15 million to expand its network of dental clinics to start with.
The company had earlier stated it will spend around Rs 150 crore over the next couple of years to expand presence in this space. Narayana Hrudayalaya, in fact has set up a wholly-owned subsidiary for this foray and in addition to dental clinics, the company is also looking at cosmetology and may at a later stage look at eye-care and birthing centres.
Nitish Shetty, MD, of Narayana Hrudayalaya’s retail healthcare subsidiary, confirmed that talks with PE funds are at an advanced stage and they intend to sew it up in the next two months. The company has around 30 dental clinics as of now and it aims to scale this up to 200 in three years time.
According to Shetty, in India 98 per cent of the segment is ‘dentist-entrepreneur-driven’. “Since dental health is of critical importance going by its impact on cardiac diseases and diabetes, there is a need to expand dedicated facilities in the country,” he added.
In India, the dental care services market is estimated to be $600 million with a CAGR of 10 per cent since 2000 and its equipment sector valued around $90 million.
The key growth driver in dental medicine is the growing awareness and interest towards the need for healthy teeth and dental cosmetics. Over 80 per cent of the revenues generated by Narayana Hrudayalaya Dental Clinics (NHDC), since commencing operations is from the aesthetic dentistry space, he said.
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Dental tourism forms 10 per cent of the total Indian medical tourism which is projected to grow at 30 per cent to Rs 9,500 crore by 2015. India produces over 18,000 dentists annually from 283 dental colleges. The country has around 1,500 oral and maxillofacial surgeons.
The General Dentist Concentration, according to Dr Shetty is one dentist for every 30,000 persons.
While urban concentration indicates one dentist for every 10,000 persons for the rural areas it is one dentist for every 250,000 persons.
The Oral Disease Prevalence in the country indicates that over 80 per cent of children and 60 per cent of adults suffer from dental caries. Over 90 per cent of adults in the age-group of 30 years suffer from periodontal diseases.
Dental surgeons in India perform a number of Cranio Maxillo-Facial Surgeries primarily because of the high incidence of congenital abnormalities affecting around 35,000 babies.
Around 35 per cent children suffer from mal-aligned teeth and jaws. Further, Decayed Missing Filled Teeth (DFMT1) score for teenagers is 2.4 and for 35-40 age-group is 5.4. In addition, over 17 per cent of the aged population are edentulous, the remaining 78.3 per cent have some teeth missing.