Apollo Hospitals to close PE funding in a month

Company says it has received bids from three private equity companies, hopes to raise Rs 300-500 crore

Apollo Hospitals group expects to complete fund raising from private equity firms for its specialty clinics business in a month.

"We have received bids from three private equity companies and hope to raise Rs 300-500 crore funding. We should be able to close the transaction in a month," said Sangita Reddy, joint managing director of Apollo Hospitals group.

Last August the group restructured its clinics business under wholly owned subsidiary Apollo Health and Lifestyle. This subsidiary now manages group's clinics, diabetes centres, neo natal centres called Cradles and nine short stay surgical hospitals.

The proceeds from fund raising will be used to expand clinics, neo natal centres and for improving financial health of loss making short stay surgical hospitals. The latter were acquired from Nova Specialty Hospitals and Reddy aims to turn around the operations of these hospitals.

The group has also made a fresh proposal to the Foreign Investment Promotion Board which in October rejected a proposal to raise Rs 750 crore through rights issue. Reddy said the group has reapplied to the board.

Foreign institutional investors own over 43 percent in the hospital group with Malayasia's IHH group and Oppenheimer Developing Markets Funds are the largest foreign investors in the hospital chain.

Apollo Hospital group has also tied up with UK-based Health Education England to explore possibilities of setting up a global healthcare school. Healthcare degrees from India are not automatically recognised and thus the idea is to create education platform where global learning is made available to professionals. "We are exploring if we can offer short term courses for health professionals and the goal is to offer under graduate and post graduate degrees," she said.