Need to develop ecosystem to make our products accessible, says Geoff Martha, chairman and CEO of Medtronic
medical device maker Medtronic, which gave the world the first battery-powered pacemaker seven decades ago, is betting big on India. Geoff Martha, its chairman and CEO, told Viswanath Pilla in an interview that Medtronic's next phase of growth in the country will involve evaluating possibilities of redesigning products to make them more affordable for patients, sourcing components locally, and manufacturing in India. Edited excerpts:
How are you planning to achieve Medtronic's goal of reaching 1 billion patients every year?
We reach two patients every second and we're very proud of it. But 80 million people is a fraction of the world's population… With these digital technologies coming in, I think that'll allow us to access so many more patients. Because it's going to personalise these therapies, lower the cost. So that's the aspiration that we need to map our strategy to get to 1 billion a year.
India is a huge market but also a challenging one to crack. How are you tapping the Indian market?
We have been serving Indian patients for 40 years, trained physicians for years. Since 2011, we've ramped up our research and development capabilities in India. Today, we're celebrating the expansion of the Medtronic Engineering and Innovation Center (MEIC). We've got 1,000 engineers here and plan to add another 500 over the next years or two; it could even go faster than that. So we've got great R&D capabilities here. They're designing products for the world. And our products historically have not been accessible to a lot
