Hospital sector seeing better days ahead after over 2 years of subdued performance: ICRA

11 Jul 2019 Evaluate

Rating agency ICRA in its latest report has said that the hospital sector is seeing better days ahead after more than two years of subdued performance which was mainly due to several regulatory measures. It highlighted that the tough days were triggered primarily on account of several regulatory measures, including the cap on prices of stents and knee implants by the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA).

It further mentioned that adverse impact of the GST rollout on profitability, strict regulatory actions taken by multiple States including restrictions on procedure rates -levying penalties and placing operational limitations on erring hospitals were other measures that impacted the sector. The performance was also impacted due to the start-up cost of new hospitals owing to significant capex by entities in the sector, and the long gestation period required for the new facilities to ramp up.

Kapil Banga, Assistant Vice President - Corporate Ratings, ICRA, said ‘in line with our expectations, the performance of the players in the sector has likely bottomed out, after struggling for more than two years. Nonetheless, the regulatory environment continues to be the overarching challenge for the hospital sector; the wide-ranging regulatory restrictions from multiple authorities had suppressed their margins.’

Besides, in the last financial year (FY19), revenues of the companies in Icra's sample set grew 10 per cent to Rs 15,891 crore compared to revenues of Rs 14,475 crore in the previous fiscal. Sample set comprised of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise, Fortis Healthcare, Narayana Hrudalaya, Healthcare Global Enterprises, Max India and Shalby.

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