In an interview to Moneycontrol, Ameera Shah, Managing Director of Metropolis said the company will continue to be on fast pace expansion, and doubling market share in five focus cities and eight seeding cities.
Metropolis Healthcare, one of India’s largest diagnostic chain said it is hopeful of maintaining 18-20 percent revenue growth and stable margins heading into FY20.
The company reporting its first ever financial results after its initial public offering last month posted a net profit of Rs 123.6 crore, a jump of 10.5 percent over the previous year. The revenues grew 18.1 percent YoY to Rs 760 crore on YoY.
The earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) stood at 26.2 percent.
The average realisation increased from Rs 402 per test in FY18 to 447 per test in FY19, due to focus on more specialised tests.
In an interview to Moneycontrol, Ameera Shah, Managing Director of Metropolis said the company will continue to be on fast pace expansion and double market share in five focus cities and eight seeding cities.
The fives focus cities -- Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Bengaluru and Surat --constitute about 58.6 percent of revenues of Metropolis.
“It's still quite young. So even if we continue expanding our networks and go deeper, we believe we can still double our network in these five cities before reaching some sort of maturity,” Shah said.
Metropolis currently has 11-13 percent market share in the five cities.FY19 continued to be a year of aggressive network expansion for the company. Its laboratory network grew to 119 from 106 in FY2018. The collection centre network grew 40 percent from 1756 in FY18 to 2455 in FY19.
Shah said to improve margins, Metropolis is focusing on improving business to customer (B2C) ratio to 62 percent in the next two years. In FY19, B2C segment stood at 52 percent. B2C segment refers to customers who directly get their tests done from the lab, contrary to being referred by a doctor or a hospital that generally take a referral commission.
Shah said Metropolis is on a three-pronged strategy to grow its business in coming years.
“One is the organic growth, which is going deeper in focus cities, and also expanding to seeding cities, there are about 13 cities, we continue to expand a lot in these markets. And plus, of course, we are in total about 210 cities across the country, we keep expanding into additionally, on top of that, we will continue looking at acquisitions that part of a core strategy, which we have always done in the past also we will investing on new avenues of growth, which we believe will help us organize the markets,” Shah said.Metropolis is following an asset-light ‘Lab on Lease’ model, wherein leases unorganized laboratories and operates them, extending the chains best practices and branding.
