Healthcare cos. to ride out the recession

Business Today has an article on how healthcare firms are planning to accelerate their growth plans - never mind the recession.

“A slowdown is the best time for health care to consider growth,” avers G.S. Rao, Executive Director at Yashoda Hospital in Hyderabad. Rao is doing just that. He has set up an integrated and advanced cancer treatment center involving investments to the tune of Rs 100 crore; this includes over Rs 17 crore on installation of, what he calls, Asia’s first Rapid Arc Linear Accelerator, which is used for radiotherapy.

Rao also plans to invest Rs 250-300 crore on super-speciality services by 2010. His growth plans are driven by the fact that there is constant demand and it is only during a slowdown or recession that input costs come down. Funding isn’t an issue either, with Rao claiming that banks are vying with each other to offer good rates.

Yashoda is not the only hospital that’s using the headwinds of a downturn to take off. Industry major Apollo Hospitals is equally upbeat and is busy implementing its plans to add new hospital beds across various locations. The plan is to add 2,536 beds—to its existing 7,543 beds— by December 2010, including 900 in tier II and tier III cities. For this Apollo has drawn up a Rs 1,586 crore investment plan. “We had already put some of our funding in place pre-recession,” says Suneeta Reddy, Executive Director (Finance), Apollo Hospitals Group. She adds that over the past year, patient volumes are up 12 per cent. Net profits for the third quarter are up 27 per cent over the previous year’s December ended period.

Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of information and networking services to the private equity and venture capital ecosystem in India. View free samples of Venture Intelligence newsletters and reports. Email the author at arun@ventureintelligence.in

EY Tops League Table for Transaction Advisors to M&A deals in 24

Moelis & Company & PwC claim the No.2 & No.3 slots Ernst & Young (EY) topped the Venture Intelligence League Table for Transaction Advisor to M&A Deals during 2024, advising 34 deals worth $4.1 Billion. Moelis & Company stood second advising 2 deals worth $3.9 billion. PwC followed with 18 deals worth $3.3 billion. Citi ($2.5 billion across 1 deal) and Advay Capital ($2.3 billion across 1 deal) completed the top five. Among the largest M&A deals in 2024, Citi advised $2.5 Billion acquisition of the Indian business of American Tower Corporation by Brookfield , Advay Capital and Moelis & Company advised the $2.3 Billion acquisition of Care Hospitals by Aster DM Healthcare . Jefferies & Co., JP Morgan and Moelis & Company advised the $1.6 Billion acquisition of Bharat Serums & Vaccines by Mankind Pharma. Among the other notable M&A deals in Q4 2024, EY advised the $685 million acquisition of ITD Cementation ...

Morgan Stanley tops League Table for Transaction Advisors to M&A deals in 2020

Morgan Stanley , which advised the $10.1 Billion strategic investment by Facebook and Google into Reliance Industries' telecom arm Jio platforms (among other Private Equity investments in the company), topped the Venture Intelligence League Table for Transaction Advisor to M&A Deals for 2020. Ambit Corporate Finance - which advised 3 deals worth $4.0 Billion, including Brookfield's $3.7 Billion acquisition of Reliance Tower Infrastructure Trust - took the second spot. JM Financial ($3.7 Billion across 5 deals), Metta Capital ($3.4 Billion across 3 deals) and ICICI Securities ($3.4 Billion across 2 deals) - all of whom (along with Citi) are advisors to the $3.4 Billion acquisition of Future Group's retail related ventures by Reliance Retail, announced in August - completed the top five. The Venture Intelligence League Tables , the first such initiative exclusively tracking transactions involving India-based companies, are based on the value of PE and M&A tra...

Everything you wanted to know (and some things you didn't care to know) about ChrysCapital's Ashish Dhawan

New Delhi-based private equity fund ChrysCapital is vastly different from its former avatar, Chrysalis Capital. While Chrysalis began life (in Mumbai) as an venture capital firm focussed on start-up investments, today's ChrysCapital is best know for its late-stage investments (often in already public companies). The fascinating part of this transformation is that one of the fund's original partners - Senior Managing Director Ashish Dhawan - has been firmly in the driver's seat throughout the process. It's a story that needed to be told. As a cover story. Kudos to Business Today for telling it first. Thankfully, unlike the glowing profiles that BT is famous for - including the one featuring infamous stock brocker Harshad Mehta with his Lexus on the cover - this one has a lot of facts. Some well known. And others less so. That ChrysCapital's first fund would have been a disaster but for the pioneering investment in Raman Roy founded BPO firm Spectramind i...

Why did Sony Entertainment Television's CEO quit?

Businessworld has a cover story on the corporate battle that resulted in Kunal Dasgupta, the CEO of Multi Screen Media (formerly Sony Entertainment Television), quitting just a few months before his contract was due to end. Dasgupta’s abrupt exit was the culmination of six years of tension between majority shareholder Sony Pictures Television International (SPTI) that owns 61 per cent of MSM, on one hand, and Atlas Equifinn on the other, which is a consortium of Indian shareholders (Singapore-based Rakesh Aggarwal, World Media Group director Sudesh Iyer, Shemaroo Entertainment Managing Director Raman Maroo, MobiApps Holding’s Jayesh Parekh, B.R. Sule, Sushil Shergil and actor Jackie Shroff ) holding 32 per cent. Capital Japan and some financial institutions own the rest 7 per cent. And of course, the third protagonist is Dasgupta, who walked a tightrope and managed to keep his job for over 14 years despite the fact that neither group of shareholders was too happy with him. Very little...

VC Interview: Shailendra Singh of Sequoia Capital India

In a recent interview to Venture Intelligence, Shailendra Singh discussed some of the firm’s newer investments in the early stage segment including in the online payments space, the progress at a few existing portfolio companies and the active role the firm is playing in helping its portfolio companies scale and succeed in India and globally. Prior to joining the firm in 2006, Singh was a strategy consultant at Bain & Company in New York and before that, an entrepreneur in the digital media industry. Venture Intelligence: How does Sequoia go about identifying potential early stage investments in India? Is there anything different you are doing today than, say, a couple of years back? Shailendra Singh: There is a lot more focus on technology investing and early stage investing. In general, as you might remember a few years ago, we were doing primarily growth investing but in the past 18-odd months, we have had a very strong focus on early stage and that’s continuing. In terms...

The Venture Intelligence Blog

Search This Blog