Customer Business Is Our Runway For Growth, Says Metropolis Healthcare’s Ameera Shah
The firm will also focus on the specialised segment that includes diagnosis for ailments like cancer or serious stomach diseases.
Metropolis Healthcare Ltd. plans to focus on the business-to-consumer segment as India’s third-largest diagnostic services provider expands across the nation.
“We have never been a hundred percent B2B business,” Ameera Shah, promoter and managing director of Metropolis Healthcare, told BloombergQuint in an interview. “We believe that going forward, the main runway for growth is really going to come from B2C.”
That comes as shares of the company, which listed in April, surged to a record yesterday. The company’s focus on the B2C segment isn’t without reason as its revenue has increased by nearly 5 percent over FY16-19, according to a recent report by Ambit Capital. “The specialised segment isn’t commoditised,” she said, adding it’s where one needs to be quality-conscious player. “We’re finding our specialised segment and B2C (business).”
Metropolis Healthcare has aggressively expanded its patient touch-point network over the last three years to accelerate its B2C segment growth with 5x increase in collected centers, according to a recent report by Kotak Institutional Equities. That has resulted in an annualised growth rate of 21 percent for the B2C segment over FY2016-19, it said.
The company, she said, has expanded its collection centre network largely through an asset-light franchisee-led model. “The only time we need a new lab is when we are entering a new geography,” Shah said. “What makes sense is to keep adding collection centres, which we are doing through an asset-light model.”