Centre For Sight To Raise $30 Million To Set Foot In Bengal, NorthEast
Delhi headquartered Centre for Sight is in advanced talks to raise about $30 million from private equity/venture capital investors as it plans to expand operations in the country, said its founder Mahipal Singh Sachdev, on the sidelines of the launch of the leading eye care chain in Dwarka.
“We are in the process of raising funds and the announcement will come in soon,” said Singh. “We are talking to both domestic and international funds.” The development comes after the company shelved its IPO plans last year despite getting market regulator SEBI’s approval to raise about Rs 115 crore.
Centre for Sight is currently present in as many as 32 cities and runs 47 clinics. Going forward, the company wants to expand its operations in UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, besides entering newer states in NorthEast and West Bengal. “We have no immediate plans to go down South. Barring that, we want to tap all the other cities,” said Singh, a former AIIMS ophthalmologist, who founded the eyecare chain and pioneered the concept of the single specialty healthcare segment way back in the mid ’90’s in India. The concept then was rather niche to people in the country.
Today, with the launch of the Dwarka clinic, Centre for Sight has 12 facilities in the Delhi-NCR region. “This is the largest centre that is expected to become the hub for medical tourism and academic and research centre. “The proximity to the airport will help us develop this centre as a medical tourism hub,” said Singh, adding the provision available in the Dwarka clinic is to see 1000 patients a day.
Today, ophthalmology (eye care) is an important segment where people typically prefer to walk in to single specialty hospitals or day care centres for treatment rather than visiting multi-specialty hospitals. The reasons behind this are rather obvious. First, one gets specialised doctors, and second, in a lot of ways, single specialty healthcare chains work out cheaper on the wallets of consumers. In multi-specialty chains, there are several factors that work out to be more expensive since one typically can’t ignore costs associated with average length of stay of a patient and per bed price. Besides, sometimes, there are also additional charges pertaining to ICU, etc.
Globally, as per industry estimates, around 25 crore people are visually impaired of which 3.6 crore are thoroughly blind. However, what’s alarming is the fact that India accounts for 33 per cent of global blindness.
