How GE Healthcare is taking India-made products to the world

An “incredible innovation market” is how John Flannery, President and Chief Executive Officer of GE Healthcare, sees India as the company takes its locally made affordable products beyond emerging markets into developed markets as well.

“Everybody is managing the same basic equation whether you are in New York or Africa or India. They are trying to deal with the best outcome at a manageable cost and they are trying to deal with this data explosion, deal with mobility. Those things are pretty consistent everywhere,” Flannery told BusinessLine, on Tuesday. While it is early days yet, he says this “Sustainable Healthcare Solutions” (SHS) business is poised for greater growth in other markets, such as the US, as well.

Illustrating why these products are making headway, he says the locally made CT imaging machine is “40 per cent less expensive than the product could be anywhere else in the world; it consumes 50 per cent less electricity, has a substantially smaller footprint — so it can fit in many places — and the scan time is 28 per cent faster, so you can get more throughput.” These products are fundamentally “transformative” because of the cost and some degree of access, he points out.

“We started this (SHS) last year. It’s one of the first things I did in this job once I took over the business,” he says, adding that the segment is the fastest growing in GE Healthcare’s overall business. “So it helps us in India but it really helps us globally as well,” he says.

Initially, GE Healthcare invested in this range of products, tailored for the local market, involving different technologies and different price points etc.

Since 2010, it has invested about $120 million in product development, and currently there are about 28 such products in the market.

“We’ve got another 14 products in the development cycle ... so, we have around 50 products globally that we have engineered and designed and developed in India. Those are selling well in India, (and) selling quite well globally as well,” he says.

Putting it in perspective, Flannery says sales from these ‘made in India’ products accounted for 7 to 8 per cent of local sales a couple of years ago. “That was 14 per cent last year, 20 per cent this year and we expect it to become about 50/50 a few years down the road,” he added. GE Healthcare is growing at 20 per cent in India and expects to end calendar year 2016 with revenues of ₹5,000 crore, including exports from the South Asian region.

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