2021 comes with a new hope for a pandemic-free world

2020 was a black swan event, and brought its own set of problems and severely tested our efficiency, resilience and capability. There were a lot of learnings, new processes developed, and advanced technological measures adopted to cope with the pandemic. While industries all over the world were adopting themselves to the new circumstances by social distancing and teleworking, the healthcare industry could only improvise their circumstances and bravely continue to perform their duties. The healthcare segment was at the forefront during these crucial times. It made us review our custom practices, and helped us design a new work culture in time with the expanding digital world. Virtual consultations, remote monitoring, and e-ICUs played a crucial role to handle situation. We also continued on our journey of digitally transforming Finance function and launched state of art automated shared service which helped consolidate the transactions, bought controls, working capital efficiency and also helped the teams at the hospital focus on business partnering to drive profitable growth.

The year 2021 comes with a new hope for a pandemic-free world with the launch of vaccination, which was the positive outlook we needed and hoped for. With the vaccine launch hopefully the economy and international flights opens up fully for us to get back on the track of growth with the international patients contributing to 25 percent of our revenue in our Delhi hospitals pre-COVID.

As we gear up the organization for the fiscal year, we have become much more aggressive in our investment in digital and would continue to invest in Critical CapEx to ensure superior clinical outcome and satisfy our patient needs and continue in our vision of becoming India leading healthcare destination. There is a lot of thought process, research, and planning that has gone into enhancing the equipment across our hospitals to further our clinical programs in select locations. Our acquisition with Columbia Asia is under review and we are waiting for the regulatory approval. The acquisition will add eleven hospitals to our chain, and we will spend a significant amount of time and money once the approval comes through to ensure integration of both the organizations without losing their core values. We are also looking forward to expand in under-served areas of the country, like the eastern regions and may also look at some greenfield options on Bengaluru and hence we look at the 2022 with a lot of optimism.

There are two issues that have come to the forefront during the pandemic, one of which is cost and cash flow pressure. With the updated hygiene regulations such as additional sterilization and PPE suits, the cost prices saw a severe hike with an increasing need of manpower. The cost pressure could not be off loaded on the patients and therefore many small hospital groups and standalone hospitals were unable to sustain themselves. While large healthcare groups were able to balance this eventuality, many small hospitals could not stay the same. This led to our second problem of consolidation. With a drastic inflow of cases due to the pandemic, and a pause in regular flow of patients, many hospitals lost their financial footing, which is proving to be a major cause for consolidation.

We saw revenue reduction of almost 30 percent in comparison to the fiscal year in the first six months. However as the pandemic started to wane, around October, our non-COVID patients returned for their regular consultations. We would now be spending more aggressively on branding, digitally enabling business, improving patient experience in real time, employee, and consultant engagements without giving up the efficiency that we have been able to achieve in this year so that we are able to ramp up our profitability and generate returns for our shareholders, employees, consultants and all our lenders and business associates.

The pandemic has proven that everyone needs to learn, unlearn, and relearn and be agile to the changing environment in real time without giving up on core values that define business and we at Manipal were able to do that very effectively. Things are not all doom and all measures that we put in place have put the company well on the path of becoming one of the leading healthcare organizations in the country.