Kaushik Shah, Director, Hemant Surgicals, talks about the opportunities for the company in India, the challenges they face currently and their strategy to thrive in this highly volatile market situation
What was your thought process while establishing Hemant Surgicals?
Hemant Surgical Industries was established in the 1987 with a vision to promote quality and affordable surgical products in Indian market. We are the agent of JMS Singapore and JMS Japan which is a public listed company in Japan. Their company profile includes manufacturing of high-end adhesive surgical tapes, disposables pertaining to blood transfusion and infusion therapy, haemodialysis disposables and many other quality products to pen down. With sincere efforts over past 25 years of Japan Medical Supply (JMS) and Hemant Surgical Industries, the company has built a trust and benchmark of providing quality products and it’s very well accepted across national level. The end users and customers are satisfied with the high precision quality. Besides JMS, we are pioneer in importing Refurbished haemodialysis machines providing 24 X 7 services back up which is economical for dialysis centres. Due to affordability and prompt service we have achieved a benchmark of more than 1000 installations across with satisfactory results. The company also provides dialysis disposables which are imported and manufactured by our self. We have also diversified its vast range into urology and respiratory and other hospital care devices.
Can you throw more light on your rent concept?
As the dollar value is soaring high and import duty is also unfavorable the cost of life saving products are getting expansive so we offer these products on rental service to the market in order to enable nephrologist to bring down the cost of dialysis and other related services. Apart from this we also intend to import cardiac products and equipment and rent it out to the medical fraternity. This is helping them save cost on buying high end equipment. Besides this, we also have plans to export injectable products which we are currently manufacturing at our Achhad plant. We are also going in for a WHO certification for manufacturing and outsourcing of these products to make it affordable to the Indian as well as global markets.
How many sales offices do you have in India?
We have three register sales offices in India (two in Mumbai and one in Delhi) and two manufacturing plants in Maharashtra.
What are your dealer networks? And who takes care of your after sales services?
We have around 300 dealers across India for making our range of products available to the end users and medical fraternity. Due to our presence for more than 28 years, all the leading most cardio and nephrologist are our key opinion leaders for guiding us to develop quality products and are also our customers for using our cardiac and nephrology range. We have our service team of 28 bio-medical engineers for servicing of haemodialysis machines and other medical equipment.
What opportunities do you see within Indian healthcare sector?
With the growing GDP and population we find immense opportunity in Indian healthcare sector we are very positive about the growth prospects of this industry. Being in the sector since 1987, we believe that the sector is poised to grow at a CAGR of 15-20 per cent per annum.
What is your strategy to tap the Indian market?
The company plans to focus on online marketing with the help of leading marketplace portals like Amazon, Flip kart etc., to reach end users. We have been very aggressive in online marketing and have kept are pricing extremely affordable. We are also investing in print advertising such as healthcare magazines which have the right target audience.
What are the challenges you face in Indian healthcare market? What is the need of the hour?
The biggest challenge we face in the Indian healthcare market is obtaining any license within time frame for manufacturing and importing the product. The government system has to be more transparent and efficient and there has to be a single window system for procurement of the license. The present government is focusing on made in India concept that is local manufacturing by imposing heavy import duty on imports. Besides there is no stability and import risk due to heavy fluctuation in the exchange which makes Imports very difficult. As a importer our biggest challenge will be to bring affordability and economic viability for marketing our products in front of local manufacturing.
Has the government demonetisation impacted your business?
We appreciate the decision taken by our prime minister for ruling out the corruption and black money but due to inefficiency of the bankers and other law of limitation, our customers finds it very difficult to withdraw their our money and do the purchasing in the surgical market from last three month we have seen 35-40 per cent down sales due to cash demonetisation.
What are your plans for 2017? Any new product launches in the pipeline?
Our current Prime minister is emphasising on local manufacturing by providing several subsidies and on other hand import is getting unfavorable due to heavy duty structure. Lifesaving products and needy products are unaffordable at times. Due to de-valuation of Indian rupee in front of other currencies, the situation is getting very tuff for imports in the view of the above we are planning to set up a local manufacturing with our principal for making our products more affordable and economically viable in front of local manufacturers.
The company vision is to bring quality healthcare, cardiac and lifesavings products in 2017.