Shalby Hospitals – Global leadership position in orthopedics and driving excellence through multispecialty offerings

Shalby, founded in 1994 as a six-bed single-specialty hospital, has now transformed into a preferred multispecialty hospital group across western and central India with 2000+ bed capacity. We have now 15 hospitals in our network with presence in Ahmedabad, Surat, Vapi, Indore, Jabalpur, Jaipur, Mumbai, Lucknow, Udaipur, Gwalior, and Ranchi, including multispecialty and single-specialty hospitals. Being a household name in orthopedic services, Shalby has also proven its clinical excellence in the specialties of cardiology, oncology, neurology, nephrology, critical care, etc., with more than 4000 employees, including 1000+ doctors and consultants associated with us.

Shalby has a well-established presence in the Indian hospital segment, and is the only hospital player to consistently generate positive EBITDA. Our hospital business revenue and EBITDA have been growing at a CAGR of 20 percent and 22 percent respectively over the past 15 years. We are proud to state that we continue to maintain a healthy balance sheet with net cash-positive at group level, which places us to fund our strategic growth plans in near future to expand our footprints in western, northern, and eastern parts of India.

We are proud to say that Shalby has achieved a landmark of 150,000 joint replacement surgeries (since inception), and continues to maintain its significant leadership position in global volumes in the arthroplasty segment. Shalby has delivered a robust hospital business performance in FY23, which was primarily driven by significant growth across our core specialties, a strong rise in surgical procedures, rise in in-patient count by ~18 percent YoY, improved occupancy levels, and a healthy growth in ARPOB. Our growth in the hospital business is well supported by robust growth in our international business and homecare services, which grew by 140 percent and 30 percent Y-o-Y respectively in FY23.

As we stepped into FY24, our focus remained on ramping up occupancy levels across all our units with optimizing revenue and payer mix, while delivering the best clinical outcome in the healthcare industry. Our homecare services will continue to deliver impressive performance on the back of growing demand for home-healthcare services. On the cusp of making India a preferred medical tourism destination for affordable medical services with high clinical excellence, we strongly believe Shalby is very well positioned to take maximum advantage of this being the largest player in western and central India.

Under the strategic direction and growing with asset-light, we have conceptualized a franchise business model to leverage our expertise and brand equity in orthopedics in Shalby operated and Shalby managed business model. We have branded these centers as Shalby Orthopedics Centers of Excellence (SOCE) with 30–40 bed capacity, catering to provide complete orthopedic solutions like joint replacement, trauma, spine, etc. During the last one and a half year, we have successfully added five franchise centers in Ahmedabad, Udaipur, Lucknow, Gwalior, and Rachi locations and have MOUs signed at Rajkot.

We are expanding into untapped regions with high potential by providing first-class orthopedic solutions through our highly skilled orthopedic team of doctors, and plan to open 50 SOCE centers in the next 3–4 years.

Expectations from the government

• India aspires to be a top medical tourism destination; increased policy support and better connectivity can drive medical tourism beyond the metro cities and penetrating Tier-II and Tier-III in India, which also has the equal state-of-art medical infrastructure and medical services.
• Enforcing GST on the output healthcare services for hospitals with the option to claim complete input tax credits will be useful to reduce the burden on hospitals. Moreover, this will also benefit the government in collection of GST.
• Government should also help to provide land parcels with affordable pricing to establish better healthcare facilities in Tier-II and Tier-III cities of India. Announcing long-term tax holidays for new investments into healthcare will also give a big boost to investments in the sector.

Lastly, the company has continued to remain focused on a strong employee centric culture and prudent capital allocation. With the clear strategy and roadmap ahead for hospitals and franchise businesses, Shalby is well poised to see significant growth in coming years.