Gearing up for a challenging, yet busy year ahead

Year 2020 will be remembered in the history as the greatest learning for humankind. Across the globe we have seen a huge disruption of mobility and greatest adoption of digital tools. It has been a challenging year as the healthcare sector across the globe, which has been pushed to the brink in terms of overburdening of patient load and having to deal with a highly infectious virus. The Indian government has done a tremendous job of containing the virus by taking swift measures, be it in terms of imposing lockdown or preparedness of medical infrastructure, especially given our underpenetrated healthcare infrastructure. At the same time, our government has understood the importance of being self-reliant in key sectors such as medical devices and has swiftly launched Production Linked Incentive (PLI) initiative to boost domestic production of medical devices in India.

Year 2021 has a lot of burden to carry, given the fact how 2020 has been a year of distress for the entire world. We have started the year on a good note amidst all the uncertainty, with government approving two COVID-19 vaccines in India and overall number of new cases also indicating that the virus spread has been effectively under control in India. Healthcare will remain in focus and mainstream of discussions be it healthcare delivery, pharmaceuticals or medical devices throughout 2021 as well. If we look at global COVID-19 cases, we are witnessing an increase in daily cases across several countries with UK being severely impacted with a new strain of virus.

We will see new strains developing from time to time and disrupting regular course of life and business in various countries throughout 2021 till we vaccinate and/or develop herd immunity against COVID-19 strain of viruses. At the same time, for a population base of India we expect a huge burden of spillover of elective surgeries or health disorders, which have been postponed or kept at bay in 2020. This is likely to continue to keep our healthcare delivery busy throughout 2021. We will also see new trends such as virtual consultations gaining more adoption and new health tech startups mushrooming.

At BPL Medical Technologies, we have always been focussed on developing products with Indian customers and ecosystem in mind and we will continue this roadmap in 2021 and develop new products to better suit the requirements of our country.

The government scheme of PLI is a step forward to fast track more and more Make in India medical devices and depending on how this scheme pans out manufecture, we will accelerate our efforts in this direction to make more products under the PLI scheme. We also expect demand for nursing homes market, which has been muted due to COVID-19, to pick up at a good pace in 2021. We have a well-diversified portfolio of product offerings, which caters to most of their needs. Our continuously expanding network of sales and service manpower ensures timely support to our customers across remotest parts of our large country. We also see a huge opportunity to export our products to neighbouring countries and have made significant progress in terms of registering our products in several developing countries and are focussing on expanding our business in these geographies. Moreover, with COVID-19 learning, we expect government spending on healthcare to increase the overall size of medical devices market in India.

With all these drivers, we expect 2021 to be yet another challenging and busy year for Indian healthcare. However, we are better prepared to manage this year by plugging all the gaps and learnings from the ordeals of the year 2020.