Health Care's New Czar

Abhay Soi’s Radiant Life Care entered the health care big league after acquiring Max last year. Now Soi has to prove he has the chops to build an institution

- Samar Srivastava

In 2010, after spending a decade turning companies around, Abhay Soi, 46, stepped into a business he had no experience in. Spread across five acres and 650 beds, BL Kapoor Hospital in Delhi’s Karol Bagh neighborhood was on the block. Nine years of constructing this 650,000 sq ft facility had resulted in huge cost overruns. Soi, who in his career had seen spectacular turnarounds as well as dramatic failures, thought he could make a business of it if he got the facility at book value.

Almost overnight, the first generation entrepreneur raised capital from JP Morgan and his company Radiant Life Care took over operations at the facility. “If it didn’t work out I would have thought of flipping it a couple of years later,” he admits while stating that he knew very little about the hospital business.

Nine years on, Soi has expanded his operations to 3,400 beds and an estimated ₹4,000 crore in revenue. A deal along with partner KKR to buy out Max Healthcare last December from promoters Analjit Singh and South African chain Life Healthcare Group added 10 hospitals to the two he ran with Radiant. It allows him to enter the top league—behind Apollo but ahead of Fortis and Manipal Hospitals.

The Max deal also comes at a time when private equity funds are willing to put in the patient capital that the hospital business in India needs. As opposed to earlier when they were content with taking minority stakes (Apax’s deal with Apollo in 2007 being the most prominent example), private equity funds are now more comfortable doing majority deals as they believe the business has a long way to go in terms of scale and profitability. They see ample opportunity in being able to consolidate single hospitals and regional chains into large hospital groupings.