With the healthcare services industry witnessing a steady uptrend, the Apollo group, which pioneered corporate hospitals in India, has said that its attention now is on its digital business, Apollo 24/7.
“The only thing that we have to keep working on now is 24/7 to make it a durable stable company, that's the focus. The diagnostics business for the first time in the second quarter surpassed Rs 100 crore of top line. The diagnostics is the other business that we are seeing good pick-up and we would continue to invest and grow,” Krishnan Akhileswaran, group chief financial officer, Apollo Hospitals, told Moneycontrol.
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Akhileswaran said that all three lines of business—healthcare services, diagnostics, retail health and pharmacy distribution, and digital health, which is Apollo 24/7—have seen growth in this quarter.
“The quarter results were good, and if you look at it in comparison with the first quarter, we have grown strongly across all the segments,” he added.
“The healthcare services margins have expanded to 25 percent; hospital occupancy has gone up from 60 percent in the first quarter to 68 percent in this quarter. The overall revenues from healthcare services are Rs 2,265 crore. That is one business which is doing very well,” he said.
Asked about the prospects of a strategic partnership with Amazon in the pharmacy business, Akhileswaran said the company was doing well by itself.
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“That is in the early stage, we are doing well without the strategic partner. The strategic partnership is getting built up and we would know more about it in the next two quarters because now we are integrating the tech and deciding what they should do,” Akhileswaran said.
Commenting on the Apollo HealthCo slump sale, Akhileswaran said that the company didn’t want to hurry.
In June last year, the Apollo group announced that it was re-organising its business through the slump sale of its pharmacy businesses, digital platform, and various brands to a new subsidiary, Apollo HealthCo.
“We would like to do the dilution only with the right valuation that we want. We don't want to hurry there. So, given that perspective, we would like to wait for the right valuation. There are interested players, hopefully in the next six months we should close it,” he said.
He added that Apollo was looking at expansion in metropolises like Delhi, Bombay and Bengaluru in the next three years.
“These are areas that we are looking at expanding over the next three years. We have said that we will look at expanding at least 2,000 beds, and all of that should come in the next three to four years,” he added.
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