Apollo Hospitals plans to drive its high complexity care and specialties business to realise higher revenue, senior management executives told Mint in an interview.
The chain, which owns 45 hospitals across the country, is on track to add 1,400 beds starting in FY26 and hopes to operationalise them in the next two years. The focus for the next three to four years will remain on increasing the company’s presence in its core metro cities, the executives said.
“[In Q3 of FY25], we saw twice the volume for our high complexity care as opposed to our overall volume growth, which has driven up our ARPOB and has also aided us in our Ebitda expansion,” Madhu Sasidhar, president and CEO of the hospitals division, told Mint.
Apollo reported an 8% year-on-year increase to ₹60,839 in its ARPOB, or average revenue per operating bed, in the third quarter.
High complexity care refers to treatments that require intensive care, high level of medical expertise, teams of specialists, and high-tech medical equipment. Apollo has been investing in this with offerings like CAR-T cell therapy and proton beam therapies for cancer, minimally invasive brain surgeries, and robotic cardiac surgery.
The hospital chain will continue to focus on driving up volumes in these speciality segments such as cardiac, oncology, neurology, gastro, and orthopaedics (CONGO).
The inpatient volume for these segments increased by 10.3% in Q3 compared with overall inpatient growth of 5.3%, leading to higher revenue realisation in the quarter ended December, the company said in a presentation.
Among these segments, ortho accounted for 10% of inpatient revenue, neuro 10%, gastro 6%, oncology 17% and cardio 18%.
On track for expansion
The company said last quarter that it plans to commission 1,400 beds across six facilities in FY26 in the National Capital Region, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Pune.
“We have not added beds… a lot of bed addition will come in the next fiscal year,” Sasidhar said.
Apollo Hospitals had 7,996 operating beds across its network of owned hospitals as of 31 December.
The chain is on track to achieve its larger target of adding 3,512 beds in the next three to four years, the executives said. The additional cities where it plans to add beds include Mumbai, Varanasi and Lucknow.
The company will focus on growing in six core metros, CFO Krishnan Akhileswaran said.
“We already have three of the large metros in the south – Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad – and then you have the other three metros which are Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata,” he said.
While a lot of the planned bed expansion is greenfield, the company is also open to inorganic expansion in the core metros.
Apollo Hospitals announced its Q3 results on Monday, outperforming analyst estimates polled by Bloomberg. Its consolidated profit after tax rose 52% year-on-year to ₹372 crore and revenue grew 14% to ₹5,527 crore. Ebitda climbed 24% to ₹762 crore.
The company announced its results after the stock market closed on Monday. The company’s shares dipped over 5% to ₹6,404.20 in intraday trading on Tuesday amid profit booking by investors.
