Viswanath Pilla Moneycontrol News
Portea Medical, India's largest out-of-hospital healthcare service provider, said it is set to become profitable in the next 18 months, sustaining a growth of 50-60 percent in revenue.
"We hardly scratched the surface, we wanted to go deep in each every city we are present in," said Meena Ganesh, Co-founder and CEO of Portea, in an exclusive interview to Moneycontrol.
Portea, promoted by serial entrepreneur Meena Ganesh and her husband Krishnan Ganesh, started operations in June 2013 from a small office in Bengaluru, a skeletal team and less than 50 customers.
The company now has a team of over 4000 people, operations across 16 cities in India, and clocks over 1,20,000 visits to patients' homes each month.
Ganesh said that operations in most cities are at a break-even level. The company declined to provide financial details like revenue.
Portea provides four broad healthcare services on its online platform -- primary care, chronic disease management, elder care and post-operative care.
Services offered include physiotherapy, consultations with doctors, specialty pharmacy, and wellness and diabetic care.
While the company makes half of its revenue from services provided, a third of it comes from sale of specialty medicines and the rest from renting out and trading medical devices and equipment.
Portea has raised around $60 million in three rounds of funding. It last raised money, around $26 million, in a funding round in November.
The round was led by Sabre Partners and Manipal group, and included participation from existing investors Accel Partners, International Finance Corporation, and Qualcomm Ventures.
Ganesh said the company is sufficiently funded, and is constantly looking at segments like nutrition, mental health and tele-medicine for acquisitions.
"We don't have any acquisition target in mind, but any target acquisition should be based on technology and led by technology," he said.
Portea has acquired three companies till date.
The acquisition of specialty pharmaceutical distributor MedybizPharma in 2015 helped the company cross sell specialty drugs of high value to patients with cancer and rheumatoid arthritis who required services for administering the drug.
Another acquisition, done in 2016, was that of Health Mantra India, which deals in the sale and leasing of medical equipment. The two acquisitions together contribute around 50 percent of Portea's revenue.
In 2016, the company also acquired stake in PSTakeCare, a platform that connects stakeholders of the healthcare ecosystem.
India's home healthcare market stood at around $3.20 billion in 2016 and is expected to grow to around $4.46 billion by the end of 2018 and $6.21 billion by the end of 2020.
The segment is growing at 25 percent a year in India, particularly due to the rise in ageing population, chronic disease problem and higher disposable incomes.
Also, the family structure of support for the elderly is falling apart across the country and is unable to cope up with the commitment required to take care elderly people. The social taboo surrounding institutional care for ageing parents isn't helping matters.
Hospitals, insurers and pharmaceutical companies are now increasingly aligning with home healthcare providers to deliver care to patients.
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