Malaysian hospital group IHH Healthcare will step up its growth in India now that the legal fight over its Fortis Healthcare takeover has been settled, Business Standard reported. Group chief executive Dr Prem Kumar Nair and group corporate officer Ashok Pandit set out the plan in an interview. They named India as one of the group’s top markets, with Fortis as the brand it will grow through.
The group works in 10 countries and employs about 76,000 people, Business Standard reported. Its main markets are Malaysia, Singapore and Turkey, with India added through the 2018 purchase of Fortis. The tender offer that held up the deal for years is now complete, which lets it move faster. Fortis, Nair said, would be the main vehicle for growth in India.
Beds, clusters and brownfield sites
Fortis and its sister brand Gleneagles run about 6,000 beds in India, and the group wants that at 10,000 beds by 2030, Business Standard reported. Pandit said leadership would not be judged by bed count alone. He listed clinical results, patient experience and revenue share, but said unmet demand made more beds the near-term need.
The group set out two ways to add them. The first is brownfield growth at hospitals it already owns. It runs 36 Indian sites at about 70 to 80 per cent occupancy, high enough that patients are turned away for want of a bed, Nair said. The second is cluster growth, buying and folding in hospitals where it is already strong, in Punjab, Delhi and Mumbai. Pandit named Tier-2 cities in Punjab such as Amritsar as further targets.
IHH has split its brands by role. Fortis stays the home brand, which Nair likened to Mount Elizabeth in Singapore, while Gleneagles, already in Singapore, Malaysia and India, is the brand it would take abroad. Business Standard reported that no other group brand is being brought into India, and that Fortis’s best sites carry advanced cancer equipment and strong results.
Medical tourism and the West Asia dip
India draws medical tourism from West Asia, Africa and Central Asia, Business Standard reported. The group said it would place facilitation offices, as it already has in Africa, to help those patients with visas and other steps. The pitch rests on India’s standing as a low-cost health destination with a deep base of doctors.
The West Asia conflict has cut into that flow. Nair said arrivals from West Asia were down 25 to 30 per cent, a fall reported across the country’s hubs as the fighting spread. It runs alongside the 50 to 75 per cent drops some Indian chains recorded at the worst point. He argued the loss was mostly deferred, not lost, because most of the work is elective. Medical travel is “deferred rather than stopping completely”, he said, and tends to rebound once a crisis passes. For now the West Asia numbers are down 25 to 30 per cent, and the group is treating that as deferred, not lost.
That reading fits the wider India numbers, where the inbound trade has been growing toward a projected $16.2 billion by 2030 even as single quarters swing on events abroad.
Where the group sees growth
Nair and Pandit pointed to day-care as the next phase, with treatments such as chemotherapy and dialysis moving out of full admission. Fortis has put money into cancer care, Nair said, hiring staff and buying advanced machines. Nair tied the shift to a changing case mix, with heart work easing as prevention improves and cancer and joint cases rising as the population ages. On robotics, he said cheaper options were speeding take-up, and that its surgeons had tried Asian-made machines that cost less but were “as good as other machines”.
The group also showed interest in public-private partnerships. Business Standard reported that India’s finance minister had announced day-care cancer centres to be built through such partnerships, and Pandit said Fortis would be happy to look at them. Nair noted the group already runs cancer-care partnerships with governments in Singapore and Malaysia.
What to watch
There is a standing way to read a target like this one. A bed count is an announcement, and announcements run ahead of capacity, so the gap between 6,000 beds today and 10,000 beds by 2030 is a plan, not a treated patient. The medical tourism share is the more exposed number, because it rides on source markets the group does not control, and West Asia is supplying much of it now. The tests are dated. Whether arrivals from West Asia recover the 25 to 30 per cent they have lost, and whether the group’s Indian beds move toward 10,000 beds by 2030, will show in its own figures long before the marketing settles.
