Radiant Life Care, which owns and has been operating two quaternary hospitals in Delhi and Mumbai, could look at acquisitions to further strengthen its position as well as consolidate a fragmented industry of super-speciality hospitals.

Abhay Soi, Chairman, Radiant, told BusinessLine , “We are working on various transactions, including acquiring Sahara Hospital. However, Sahara Hospitals has its own requirements (legal) and multiple parties are involved.”

Radiant, which recently received an investment of $200 million (over ₹1,200 crore) from private equity firm KKR for a 49 per cent stake in the company, is expected to use this cash flow to buy the tertiary care hospital from Subrata Roy’s troubled Sahara Group.

The deal value is likely to be over ₹500 crore, Soi said. This, however, is only one of at least three deals the company is working on. The company is looking to acquire two other facilities.

“They are both 350- to 500-bedded, large-scale metro-centric units with large balance sheet,” he said, adding that one of them was operational, while the other was still in the process of being completed.

Soi refused to divulge details because talks were in a nascent stage, but he confirmed that both the hospitals are super-speciality, and the three deals together will command a capital outlay of ₹1,200-1,500 crore.

“We have substantial equity and are nearly debt-free,” he said. The company, which first entered the healthcare industry merely eight years ago when it rebuilt super-speciality hospital BL Kapur (BLK) in New Delhi in 2009, currently has two stand-alone quaternary facilities under its wings: Delhi’s BLK and Mumbai’s Nanavati Hospital.

Eyeing bank partnerships

“The hospital sector has been one of the industries that has got a lot of loans and non-performing assets,” Soi said, adding that the company is looking at partnering with banks to take control of and turn around some of these assets.

Soi’s Radiant is looking at the acquisition and expansion route to growth instead of making hospital facilities from scratch. “It is one thing to renovate a hospital and entirely another thing to build one. As we see it, the construction sector has its own risks associated with it,” he said.

It is already expanding its Nanavati and BLK facilities by 500 beds each. The Sahara Hospital, which is a 350-bed facility, can also be expanded by another 200 beds at the least.

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