Best CEOs: How Suneeta Reddy is expanding Apollo Hospitals’ India footprint

A woman of habit, Suneeta Reddy, MD of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise, has been striving hard since she joined the business in 1989 to keep it at the forefront of healthcare services in the country. Under her leadership, Apollo—which started as a single hospital in Chennai in 1983—has now mushroomed into one of the biggest healthcare businesses in India. Today, it offers a wide range of healthcare services through its chain of 71 hospitals, over 5,400 pharmacies and 250 primary healthcare centres spread across India. And even as it faces stiff competition from several quarters across its verticals, its growth momentum has continued under Reddy’s care.

As one of a handful of businesswomen in the Indian healthcare industry, Reddy is credited with bringing the first foreign direct investment into healthcare in 1995, and subsequently taking the organisation to the international equity markets through the successful placement of a global depository receipt in 2005.

With her focus on growth and profitability, Apollo’s consolidated revenues and net profit have grown at annualised rates of 15 per cent and 37 per cent, respectively, in the past five years. “I think we have been fortunate to have executed many decisions at the right time and place, and this has come from understanding the pulse of the organisation and the ecosystems around it,” says Reddy.

For her, the most important thing has been her sharp focus on execution and raising the bar on clinical outcomes. “We have driven better asset utilisation and focussed on consumer experience… We take this responsibility very seriously and we have made clinical and technology investments that support this,” she says. Reddy, who manages the business along with her sisters Preetha Reddy, Shobana Kamineni and Sangita Reddy, expects to realise the full potential of Apollo’s verticals by synergising clinical care and service delivery across hospitals, retail clinics and digital infrastructure to ensure that their patients get a holistic experience.

But planning for the future can prove to be futile if done without learnings from the past. And that adage stands very true for healthcare businesses in light of the challenges faced by them during the Covid-19 pandemic. And there were many challenges—from maintaining cash flows to dealing with rising Covid-19 patients and the evolving policies for the private sector operators, amidst the crisis. Apollo, too, had its fair share of learnings under Reddy. “The Covid-19 period was critical for us as an organisation. It was a litmus test of the patients’ trust we had built over the past decades. We needed to ensure continued clinical excellence and be at the frontline of the pandemic,” she says, adding that it gave them time to reset, rethink and re-imagine the Apollo experience for the coming years. Having handled the pressures of the pandemic with aplomb, Reddy says that the strategy cannot be separate from the organisation and its ways of working. “Keeping one’s eyes open and ears to the ground are critical to keeping the strategy alive and agile,” she says.

A focus on these aspects resulted in consolidated revenues of Rs 14,662.6 crore in FY22—a growth of 39 per cent over FY21. And net profit grew 602 per cent to Rs 1,055 crore in FY22 from a year ago. Riding on this growth, Reddy—who has emerged as the winner in the Pharma & Healthcare category of the BT-PwC India’s Best CEOs ranking this year—is spearheading efforts to transform Apollo into a digitally enabled firm. For instance, under her leadership, Apollo doctors use AI and ML algorithms to make point-of-care decisions to address clinical complexities.

And its initiatives in using new-age tech have not gone unnoticed, with brokerage firm ICICI Securities stating in a report released in February that the company’s continued focus on investing and expanding its digital network for pharmacies, doctor consultations, clinics and diagnostics, remains positive in the long-term. “She [Reddy] has been instrumental in building a strong hospital franchise and steering the group to unlock growth. This has created comprehensive offerings and enabled better patient engagement, resulting in significant value-creation for the shareholders,” says Tushar Manudhane, Research Analyst at Motilal Oswal Financial Services.

Following the experience of the pandemic, Reddy has been focussing on opening up as many services as possible, and increasing occupancy and asset utiliation across the group’s businesses. She says that she has been able to execute the company’s long-term strategies predicated on the goal of maintaining market leadership. “We have made sure that we have the assets in place to ensure this; not just in terms of physical, but clinical and technological assets as well, which will help us achieve outstanding clinical outcomes,” she says.

But leading a profitable healthcare company is just one of the hats Reddy wears. Fondly spoken of as a ‘leader with a heart’, her colleagues say that it is fulfilling to work with her. “She is the biggest patient advocate I have known, and this dominates her style of leadership and decision making. I have personally learnt a lot from her, particularly in terms of being patient-centric and operating a large enterprise that is always in growth mode,” says Dr K. Hari Prasad, President of Hospitals Division at the firm.

When asked about the prospects of the company in the next 10-15 years, Reddy says that the pace of change in the sector is so rapid that one cannot foretell what’s coming. But, she says, keeping her patients and their purpose at the core of her decisions ensures that they don’t lose direction. “In the coming few years, we are taking service delivery closer to the consumers to provide quality healthcare seamlessly across physical and digital formats,” she says, adding that they measure success by the number of lives touched, and not just by financial metrics.

As Apollo moves ahead, Reddy says that its purpose driven approach and guiding principle of ensuring quality healthcare will help it touch a billion lives.

@neetu_csharma