All our innovations have a bit of India in them: Siemens Healthineers CTO

In a Q&A, Peter Schardt talks about the Rs 1,300 crore campus his company is setting up in India, and dwells on the firm's plans in the country

Siemens Healthineers is setting up a Rs 1,300 crore campus in India and aims to develop more products for the world from the country. In an interaction with Sohini Das, the company's Chief Technology Officer, Peter Schardt, outlines his plans for India. Edited excerpts:

The global market for portable x-ray devices is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 9.2 per cent between 2022 and 2028. What are your plans in this space for the India market?

The mobile digital radiography (DR) market in India is estimated at abiut 10 million euros and is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 10 per cent over the next 5-7 years, mainly due to the digitalisation push. In our market, we need to focus on digital mobile DR in the value segment.

Q. Are you developing in India for the world?

Siemens Healthineers' Indian set up currently constitutes over 54 per cent of the global software/digital technology teams, making it the largest Siemens Healthineers Technology Centre outside of Germany. The team consists of about 2,800 people in Bengaluru and another 500 people in Slovakia, and we are actively building a new campus worth over Rs 1,300 crore to create an innovation hub for healthcare technologies. This new campus will cater to the region and will be used to create the latest healthcare technologies for the country and the world.

Our Indian team contributes to every technology that is being developed, making it a vital part of the global team. One of the innovative products that it has created is Syngo Carbon, which helps in seamless transmission of measurements in images and also speeds up and simplifies the diagnostic reporting process. About 75 per cent of the software engineering efforts for this product are from India.

In India, we roughly build about 500 CTs a year currently and with the launch of our new campus, it is set to grow even more. The manufacturing of MRIs is also set to start in a few months.

Q. What have you done over the years to bring in low-cost yet effective devices to this market?

Siemens Healthineers has, over the years, been committed to bringing affordable, quality devices to the market.  Recently, we launched an MRI device called MAGNETOM Free.Star. We rolled out an MRI where the helium requirement is less than one litre--700 milliliters actually--without compromising the quality. Typically, MRI requires a huge amount of helium (700-800 litres), which has become an extremely scarce product. This is a huge leap in technology. We have launched quite a few innovative products that are affordable and accessible to all. Recently, we built a solution for a remote cockpit, with which an MR station a hundred miles away can be managed, sitting here. Through this, we aim to penetrate rural areas, and expanding globally as well.

Q. You have recently announced a startup accelerator programme in partnership with the Nasscom Centre of Excellence. Can you share details about some of the interesting startup projects in this programme?

We had entered a partnership with Nasscom in 2020 to collaboratively nurture and support innovation in healthcare.

India has the third largest startup ecosystem in the world, with over 4,000 Health tech startups focused on different requirements. At present, we have partnered with startups Tagbox and Imaginate. Tagbox's supply chain optimisation technology will help reduce the cost of healthcare delivery by improving productivity across service operations and by minimising losses due to broken supply chains.

Through our collaborations with Nasscom and MedTech Innovator, we currently partner with over 10 startups in the areas of diagnostic imaging, in-vitro diagnostics, advanced therapy, digital health and serviceability.

Q. Which is your largest market outside Germany, and where does India rank in terms of size, contribution to global revenues? How do you see this growing in the next five years?

We have been selling medical devices in India since 1927, manufacturing them here since 1959, and driving software engineering excellence since 1993. Today, we employ about 7,000 people in India, which represents 10 per cent of our global workforce. And not to forget: basically, there is no innovation in Siemens Healthineers which doesn’t have India’s contributions in it. For us, India is one of the key growth markets on the global healthcare map. The Indian medical device market is a fast-growing market segment with a 10-12 per cent CAGR over the past decade and we expect this robust growth to continue in the years to come.