Gujarat’s healthcare major Shalby Hospitals Ltd plans to invest around ₹850 crore in the next three to five years to expand its chain of multi-specialty hospitals in many State capitals and cities across India.

Currently, the chain has 11 hospitals, four of them in Ahmedabad, and one each in Surat, Vapi, Jaipur, Indore, Jabalpur, Mohali and Mumbai. This year, it is adding one each in Delhi and Kolkata and plans to expand to State capitals and other cities having a demand-supply gap – such as Bhubaneswar, Raipur, Ranchi, Lucknow, Bhopal, Nagpur, besides Pune and Rajkot in the next phase over the next three to four years. The chain will by then have around 20 hospitals.

In July 2019, Shalby will open another hospital at Ghatkopar in Mumbai, followed by one in Nashik in January 2020 and renovate the Asha Parekh Hospital in Mumbai by August 2021.

Bed capacity

The number of beds in these hospitals will double from the existing 2,500, Vikram Shah, Chairman and Managing Director, told BusinessLine .

The company, which currently owns eight hospitals and runs another three leased properties on the operations-and-maintenance model, will continue to follow both organic and inorganic routes.

Founded as a six-bed hospital in Ahmedabad in 1994, the listed and zero-debt company had raised ₹505 crore in an IPO in 2017. Its turnover in 2017-18 was nearly ₹400 crore and the projected topline in 2018-19 is likely to be ₹480 crore. “Among the private hospitals in India, our average cost per bed is one of the lowest at ₹35 lakh,” said Shanay Vikram Shah, Director.

He said the chain’s business, growing 35 per cent year-on-year over the last 25 years, has never suffered losses. “We follow an asset-light model and have a 15 per cent market share of all joint replacement surgeries conducted by private corporate hospitals in India.

Shalby Hospitals, which earned a name for its joint replacement centres, has so far performed over one lakh joint replacement surgeries and won the Gujarat government’s Medical Tourism Awards consecutively in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

More than 15 crore Indians suffer from knee problems. Of them, around four crore require knee replacements. The high incidence of knee arthritis in South Asia, including India, has been due to genetic predisposition towards the disease and practices that result in the overuse of knee joints.

Shah said the incidence knee osteoarthritis among South Asians is 15 times higher than in Europe, America and other places. Genetically, South Asians have fewer cases of hip osteoarthritis but squatting habit of toiletry, quality of food, deficiency of vitamins, low protein diet, and vegetarianism are some of the reasons for higher incidences of knee problems.

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