Apollo Hospitals will be investing nearly Rs.1,000 crore to set up 12 new hospitals in small towns across the country in the next two years.
“We will be investing up to Rs.1,000 crore to set up 12 ‘Apollo Reach' hospitals in tier-II and tier-III cities. The investment per hospital will be in the range of Rs.80-100 crore,” Apollo Hospitals Chairman Prathap C. Reddy told journalists here.
Through Apollo Reach Hospitals, the Apollo Hospitals Group plans to expand its tertiary healthcare business into semi-urban and rural areas. While construction work has already started on six hospitals, the company is still in the process of finalising sites for six more.
“We have short-listed 14 locations, while construction work has started at Tiruchi, Varanasi, Visakhapatnam, Nashik, Allahabad and suburban Mumbai. We have already tied up funds for the first six hospitals. It would be in the form of debt and internal accruals. As we have an excellent debt-equity ratio, funding the next round of investment would not be an issue.
These new hospitals will house training institutes for nurses and paramedical staff,” Dr. Reddy said. The company plans to increase its bed capacity to 12,000 and augment the size of its workforce to 85,000 employees by 2015.
The group is also planning to invest Rs.100 crore on setting up another 500 pharmacies across the country in the next 15 months. At present, it has nearly 1,200 pharmacies.
