Aim to have close to 3000 pharmacies by end of this year: Apollo Hospital

Apollo Hopsitals' Q3 earnings were in line with street estimates but profit was impacted due to higher depreciation and finance costs on account of new hospitals like Navi Mumbai coming on stream.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Akhileshwaran Krishnan, CFO of Apollo Hospital spoke about the results and his outlook for the company.

There has been an impact of stent pricing, goods and services tax (GST), which we have already absorbed. Even after absorbing all of that, we have been able to come in with 21.3 percent operating margins on healthcare services, he said.

We do plan to take it higher over the next year. Our target is to get it higher at least by 100 basis points (bps) over the next year, he added.

New hospitals did very well. The growth of the new hospitals has been 37 percent year on year (YoY) and this has been aided by across the board performance of all the new hospitals, said Krishnan.

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Akhileshwaran Krishnan

CFO|Apollo Hospital

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The focus has been on high-end surgeries that have seen good growth, he said.

On pharmacy segment performance, he said that we have seen this business go from 5-6 percent return on capital (RoC) to almost around 18 percent RoC. We should be able to continue to see return on investment (RoI) and RoC of pharmacies expand. The number of pharmacies that we have across is now 2,850 and we are hopeful of getting closer to 3,000 store number by end of this year.

For full interview, watch accompanying video...