Want to get into home care segment: Sameer Garde

Interview with President,South Asia, Philips Healthcare

Royal Philips' move to become a medical technology firm got an India twist, as the company announced the launch of its Healthcare Innovation Centre (HIC), the first-of-its-kind in an emerging market. Healthcare is the biggest revenue generator for the company with the segment’s contribution touching 50 per cent revenues. Sameer Garde, who joined Philips Healthcare as President, South Asia has the mandate to not only increase revenue but also to diversify the health business. In an interview with Shivani Shinde Nadhe, he talks about the need to embrace newer areas in healthcare like home care and healthy living. Edited excerpts…

Philips globally is moving towards a becoming a medical healthcare company. What will be the strategy going ahead in India?

Philips as a company is big on markets in the waiting. A good example of that is the HIC facility in Pune. In the consumer lifestyle business we acquired Maya Appliances, brand owner of Preethi kitchenware.

Globally 50 per cent of our business comes from healthcare. This business has a massive potential of 100 billion Euro’s. If you look at our consumer lifestyle and healthcare business it is around Euro15 billion. That means of the 100 billion potential we have just 15 per so we have phenomenal area to grow.

At present we are focused on diagnostic, therapy, treatment, post therapy (ICU) and home care. But there is a significant amount of opportunity in healthy living. It is an upstream solution for healthcare. At present we are directly concerned with patients who have had an incident and require a diagnosis or intervention. What we want to get into is upstream health opportunity which is healthy living. This will constitute products such as Airfryer, skin care products, hair care products. Prevention is a huge part of healthcare, if India as a country spends and focuses on healthy living the cost of downstream cost on health we go down.

In India too healthcare will be a significant chunk of Philips revenue?

As you are aware, the current Philips segmentation will continue till the end of this year. From next year Philips will have two industries, health technology (combined unit of healthcare and consumer lifestyle) and lighting business units. Health Tech will be around 54 per cent revenue in India.

Since healthcare and consumer lifestyle will be combined unit, do we see Philips also entering the wearables market and what are your plans around that?

We have a unique strategy to focus on the health continuum with our professional and consumer portfolio. We focus on innovative solutions that support (at-risk) patients and health minded people continuously, anywhere and anytime.

Healthy living is an area which you see as having significant potential, but you will be competing with several others. What is the market share of Philips in the categories within Healthy Living?

We are the market leaders in Healthy Living and our Consumer Lifestyle division recorded a growth of 28 per cent in the year ended March 2014. Within Consumer Lifestyle, the Personal Care division recorded a growth of 75 per cent CAGR over the last three years. In the Healthy Living segment we are focusing on Air purification, globally we are present in brand called Sonicare for oral care.

The third area is personal health. We all use smartphones and have apps or gadgets to measure health vitals. But there is no use of this if this is not seen by physician. We want to get into that space. Prevention, diagnosis, therapy, treatment and home care, that’s the continuum that we are trying to focus.

What are the plans in the Home Care segment?

We have various solutions and product in the Home Care segment. For instance, in India chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is a 12 million potential patient opportunity. What is crucial in these segments is proper diagnosis, for which we need the required pulmonologist. Along with that patients need a device (it can be a non invasive ventilator), someone to take care of the device, certain regular frequency that a respiratory therapist can go and pick up the data and a physician to can look at it and perhaps be available for a talk.

We are already running pilots of such a system in 4-6 cities in India and we will roll out these services in a few months time.

How significant will be the role of HIC for Philips?

Clearly it is a matter of pride that we have developed and manufacturing these products in India. A lot of feedback has been taken into manufacturing these products which helps building the durability and reliability of these products. It’s not that imported products are not durable and reliable but they may not have taken into consideration Indian conditions. Second is the reduction in lead time. If you are importing or bringing in products from far away destination, it takes longer time to reach here.