The product is entirely designed, developed and manufactured in India by Philips Healthcare Innovation Center (HIC) in Pune. With this, the company seeks to provide access to affordable cardiac care in tier-II and tier-III cities.
Intuis will be the sixth product that Philips' centre in Pune has developed grounds-up for the Indian and the global markets.
"This is the sixth Philips product which is entirely designed, developed and manufactured in India. We are looking at India as a global supply base for our products. Our strategy is to build a mature organisation in India. We are also expanding our mobile surgery portfolio in Pune for global markets.While we are manufacturing and designing our imaging products from India, we will also begin designing mammography portfolio from here," said Bert Van Meurs, general manager image guided therapy at Philips.
With the launch of the cath lab, Philips will have three portfolio products being designed and developed out of India these include-imaging, cath labs and mobile surgery portfolio.
"Today, 50 per cent of our mobile surgery products are developed in Netherlands and 50 per cent in Pune. We have a large range of product portfolio, going ahead we will have some of our general x-ray's being designed and developed here. Other than diagnostic products we are also exploring to get some of the consumer market focused to be manufactured in India," added Meurs.
Other than designing and developing high-end diagnostic products out of India, Philips is also trying to increase the localised component in its product. "When we started the HIC in Pune we were at 20 per cent localisation, today that has moved to 40 per cent. Moreover, with these products we now cater to almost 80 countries both emerging and several of the Western European markets," said Rekha Ranganathan, general manager, mobile surgery, Philips image guided therapy systems and head of Philips HIC.
The company said that the products developed at the HIC not only catering for the Indian market but to several of the emerging and developed markets. As Ranganathan stated that the Intuis, that has been designed and developed in India will give a competitive advantage of 25-30 per cent over other similar products. "This need is felt acutely in tier-II cities, where the availability of effective healthcare infrastructure is often a challenge. With Philips Intuis, we are addressing the evolving needs of cardiologists and patients beyond metro's and tier-I cities," she added.
Meurs said that Philips India journey as a hub for its products started with acquisition of Mumbai-based Alpha X-Ray Technologies in September 2008. "The reason why we came here was the capability to design for value. Taking a premium system and stripping it down for other markets will never work and our engineers in the Netherlands do not have the capability to design from bottom-up a value product. Our India centre capability and engineers are equipped to design in that fashion," added Meurs.
The company will export these cath labs to other markets like Latin America, Africa and Western Europe.
Philips HIC in Pune manufactures both interventional and diagnostic X-Ray systems. The center has successfully installed over 1,000 systems in more than 80 different countries, including countries in Western Europe. Since 2012, HIC has launched five global products -- MobileDiagnost Opta, Allura FC, Allura Centron, BV Vectra and Primary Diagnost.
As part of the transformation, Philips changed the name of its health care division in Pune to Healthcare Innovation Centre (HIC) from its earlier Development Manufacturing Centre.
For Philips, the Pune-based HIC is the only such centre worldwide. It does have an innovation campus in Bengaluru but this caters to all its product ranges, across categories of health care, consumer lifestyle and lighting, and focusing more on the software and services aspect.
