Thyrocare franchise business doing well; to fund Africa expansion via internal accruals: MD

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Rahul Guha, MD & CEO, Thyrocare, says: “Our partnerships business is coming along well. We will partner, of course, with the government as well to participate in many of the health tenders that are coming up in the next couple of quarters. Most of our capital allocation for the next year is going to fund our international expansion.

Africa is one of the areas that we have narrowed down to pursue our Africa international strategy. The money for the expansion will come from internal accruals.Let me ask you about FY24. Do you have any sort of guidance for the PAT as well as margin when it comes to Thyrocare? We will talk about the quarter gone by as well. How has it been?The quarter has actually gone well.

Our franchisee business is doing very well. We grew at 16% year-on-year. We had a bit of a muted performance in our partnerships business, largely because some of our key customers in the health tech space actually de-grew in this quarter.

But overall, we have been quite happy to see the momentum in our franchise business. And should that continue to the end of the year, we should end at about 12% year-on-year growth for the financial year while maintaining EBITDA margins at the similar level of quarter one.I want to understand the growth that we are expecting to see in our franchisee business. What is the contribution coming in from here? What is the expectation that you have going forward?Our franchisee business, is largely tier two and beyond, where the competitive scenario is less and we have been focused on expanding our network quite substantially.