 "Ameera Shah, Metropolis Healthcare")
Mumbai-based pathology chain operator Metropolis Healthcare is looking to expand its presence in North and East India and enter India-like markets in Southeast Asia, while strengthening its base in Africa.
"In India, we're in all zones. However, north and east have not been traditionally our strong points. We're creating a large infrastructure in these zones," said Ameera Shah, Promoter and Managing Director, Metropolis Healthcare. "A lot of expansion is happening in terms of collection centres and labs, teams, new customers, etc in these markets."
The firm, which had exited from South Africa in August citing lack of growth and regulatory hurdles, is also quite bullish about Africa as a market. "We will be looking at three-four emerging nations in Asia, too," said Shah. Of the six countries that the pathology chain has operations in, four are in the Africa, namely, Kenya, Ghana, Zambia and Mauritius. While it has labs in Sri Lanka, it collects samples from many more countries, including the UAE and Nigeria.
Indian firms are looking at replicating their local success of offering low cost higher quality services in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, where people are looking at affordable access to healthcare services. Indian firms have built a model of bringing down costs of services by increased utilisation of devices and solutions and offering them to more people.
Metropolis works on a hub-and-spoke model — one lab connects 10 collection centres in an area. "As of now, we have set up a pretty good number of labs but do not have as many spokes. Currently, we're expanding the spokes in a large way. This means, we will be able to give faster reports and better quality experience. Also, we want to increase the test offerings," she says. While this year the company looks at the expansion of spokes, next year will be more about growing the number of hubs.
Shah is also making sure that there are enough hands to assist her with the expansion plans. Of the 25-member core team, the majority are new faces including the chief executive officer, chief information officer and chief marketing officer. The expansion move is aimed at getting economies of scale and bring costs down.
According to Shah, the industry is growing at 12-15% in terms of revenue. While the company is growing at 18-20% in terms of volume, it estimates to clock in a gross revenue of Rs 750 crore this financial year.
Currently, the pathology chain has about 150 laboratories, 1,300 collection centres and does about 15 million tests a year across India. The firm is also looking to go public. "As of now, we have not decided anything yet. We're contemplating it," Shah said. Private equity major Carlyle Group holds a minority stake of 37% in the firm while the rest 63% are owned by Shah. The other major players in the segment are Dr Lal Pathlabs and Thyrocare Technologies, and both had successful IPOs recently.
According to a report by business consulting service firm RNCOS dated May, the Indian diagnostic services market is expected to continue growing at 27.5% for next five years, driven by improving health care facilities, medical diagnostic and pathological laboratories, private-public projects, and the health insurance sector. The market will swell to approximately Rs 86,000 crore in revenues market by 2020, the report adds.
Currently, pathology services dominate about 70% of the diagnostic services market.
