Apollo Hospitals Is Adding Around 300 Pharmacies A Year, Says MD Suneeta Reddy

Suneeta Reddy, MD of Apollo Hospitals Enterprises, spoke to CNBC-TV18 about the company’s business plans and shared outlook for FY20.

“We have added 30 new hospitals in the past 36 months; 40 percent of capacity has been added in the past 3 years,” said Reddy on Monday.

“Therefore, we expect the growth outlook to be strong. We grew 16 percent overall pharmacy and hospitals put together, the EBITDA grew by 27 percent. So this is a trajectory that we can expect because currently, we are at about 58 percent asset utilization. So as we improve occupancies, we can hope that the EBITDA improved accordingly,” she added.

About the pharmacy business, she said, “Since we are adding around 300 stores a year, we believe that we should see growth close to 20 percent. Our intention is to have about 5,000 pharmacies with Rs 10,000 crore of revenue in next 4-5 years.”

Talking about medical tourism, Reddy said, “The opportunity for the flow is good. This year we have improved considerably, 10 percent of our revenue comes from medical tourism and we have a plan to take it to 15 percent.”

“Now we are concentrating more on Middle East, Africa, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Philippines,” she said.

On the debt front, Reddy said, “There are 3 liquidity events. One, the improvement of free cash flow. Second is the fact that Apollo Munich will bring us Rs 250 crore of cash and third, Rs 300 crore from creating the pharmacy front-end. So totally we should bring it down to Rs 2,500 crore of debt.” – CNBC TV18