Policybazaar.com to enter healthcare space; to offer online consultation

ETechAces Marketing and Consulting Pvt. Ltd., which owns India's leading insurtech brand, PolicyBazaar.com and India's leading lending marketplace, PaisaBazaar.com, is now foraying into the healthcare tech and service space. As part of its plans to capture the out of pocket healthcare market in India estimated at nearly $100 billion, the new venture will provide free online and over the phone medical consultations, to begin with. It aims to provide 1 million free medical consultations by March 2019 and reach the scale of 5 million by March 2020. 

Given that social security support on healthcare services front is either very limited or difficult to access for the general public, the venture aims to redefine the way India seeks quality medical services, just like its parent company has done it for the insurance segment. "Our vision is to change customer behaviour in the healthcare space by making the consumer shift to online medical consultation from offline by building an easy to use, convenient and trustworthy solution. We believe that healthcare space has huge potential to disrupt, and can follow the same growth trajectory as the digital insurance space which initially faced a similar kind of consumer inertia that this space faces," said Yashish Dahiya, Co-founder and CEO, PolicyBazaar Group of Companies.

US margins under stress, Indian drug makers get booster dose in Europe

While the North American market may have dragged margins of the Indian pharmaceutical sector in 2017-18, most of the large caps seem to have done well in terms of growth in Europe. Aurobindo Pharma, for example, led the pack with a 33 per cent year-on-year (YoY) rise in EU sales, followed by Glenmark (27.55 per cent), Lupin (11.2 per cent), among others. Europe is the third-largest market for Indian drug makers, after the US and Africa. IQVIA data shows that at $35 billion, the European generics market is the world's second largest by value, after the US. For some players such as Torrent Pharma, sales from Europe almost equalled the the revenues from the US market. Analysts pointed out that the robust growth in Europe business of Aurbindo in 2017-18 is partly because of the fact that it benefited from the absence of a major player in the tendering process last year. Aurobindo had made some acquisitions in Europe (Generis Farmaceutica S.A. in Portugal in 2017 and the generic operations of Actavis in 2014) that have helped the company to boost its sales in the continent. "The company as such has done well in Europe. Even if one takes out the sales from the acquired companies, Aurobindo's Europe growth would still be at around 15-18 per cent," said Amey Chalke, analyst with HDFC Securities.

Sector-wise key expectations from Budget 2017

Latest News - With over a week left for Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to unveil the Budget 2017 on January 01, industry experts are being vocal about the expectations that they seek from the NDA-led government’s fourth Budget under the current term. 

“We believe that the government is likely to take corrective measures which would offer remedy to the demonetisation wounds. In our opinion, increase in individual income tax slab limits and reduction in corporate tax rate is expected to be the highlight of the budget in order to revive the consumption cycle,” said brokerage Angel Broking in a pre-Budget research note. 

Below are sector-wise expectations from (Read More)