Eye-Q Plans To Strengthen Presence In Smaller Cities

At a time when there is a host of eyecare chains operating in the country, Eye-Q wants to strengthen its presence in smaller towns and plans to ramp up the number of centres to 100 from the current level of 44. "Our aim is to reach out to people in small towns and offer them the required treatment and also generate employment there," Rajat Goel, Co-founder and CEO, Eye-Q Superspeciality Hospitals, tells BW Businessworld in an interview. An alumnus of IIM, Ahmedabad, Goel explains how Eye-Q wants to focus on the international market too.

What is Eye-Q's strategy to beat competition? Please throw some light on your expansion plans?
We established Eye-Q in 2007 and our strategy is pretty different when it comes to providing eyecare to patients. While we do have centres in big cities, going forward, we plan to strengthen our presence in smaller cities rather than establishing our presence in the metros. Our aim is to reach out to people in small towns and offer them the required treatment and also generate employment there. We currently have a headcount of 800 people who are employed across 44 hospitals. When we look at the road ahead, we want to ramp up the number of hospitals to 100. We currently have hospitals in Haryana, Uttarakhand, UP, Delhi, Gujarat and Maharashtra. We definitely want to increase the number of centres in these places and tap others. Also, we recently forayed into Nigeria. If plans are implemented, we also want to take out healthcare practice there.

There is significant paucity of experienced medical professionals in the country? In such a situation, what are your challenges so far?
It is true that there is a problem of skill in the country. And this is not in terms of the number of doctors alone. There is a massive challenge in getting operational staff as well and that I would say is a bigger problem. Doctors need autonomy. If you give them the required freedom, they are ready to take charge. While launching hospitals in tier II and III towns, we have faced such issues and in order to beat that, we have launched an in-house training programme where we train our staff to be a part of our healthcare chains. Besides, there are certain logistic issues that we face in terms of infrastructure.

A lot of single specialty chains have recently announced their IPO plans, the most recent one being Centre for Sight. What are your fund raising plans. Do you want to tap the capital market too?
We are well capitalised as we received funding from IFC, Helion Venture and Nexus Venture. We currently don't need to tap the market as the our investors have some more years with us. They are not looking to exit in the near future so we are not looking at the IPO route immediately.