Dubai: Abu Dhabi headquartered Centurion Investment has acquired a 40 per cent stake in NMC Healthcare, the country's largest privately owned health care company.
While details of the size of the investment were not revealed, a top official at NMC Healthcare said the funds would be handy in building new health care facilities in the UAE, key locations in the Mena territory and India.
The deal was signed on Thursday. Abu Dhabi-based NMC Healthcare was formed in 1975. Over the coming five-year term, the company expects to raise its health care network in the region to between 15 to 20 facilities from the current eight.
The emphasis will be on multi-purpose, super-speciality facilities, the official added.
Last August NMC Healthcare — which operates five hospitals and three super-speciality facilities in the UAE — initiated the private equity sale process. Now, with a new investment group on board, plans are to build new super-speciality hospitals in Dubai, for which land has been acquired, and in Abu Dhabi, to be located in Khalifa A.
At the time of launching its private equity sale, NMC Healthcare was looking at a consortium of investors, based in the UAE and the Gulf, to come on board.
Value
"Having a single new shareholder come on board in the form of Centurion Investment, we will see enhanced value addition being created," Dr B.R. Shetty, CEO and managing director of NMC Group, said in an interview to Gulf News yesterday. "At the same time, new value will be created wherever opportunities present themselves, and quite a few will in the region's health care."
Shetty said that NMC Healthcare was "valued at Dh4 billion by our financial advisers", when asked how much money was paid by Centurion for the stake purchase in NMC. He didn't elaborate further.
An immediate priority will be to have installed capacity of 1,000 beds across its health care network in the UAE. To this end, the addition of a further two super-speciality centres in Dubai and Abu Dhabi will be very useful.
"The new capacities will come in handy in ensuring the waiting time for consultation will be reduced significantly across our hospitals in the country," Shetty added.
"Quality health care at affordable rates is a reality, and we are making that happen."
The same formula would apply for the other Gulf states and even some of the countries in the wider Mena region. For some time now, NMC Healthcare had been scouting for prospects in the Gulf and further afield in emerging economies such as Libya.
India also figures on the company's radar. "The new shareholder is equally enthused by what NMC Healthcare hopes to achieve by way of a presence in India," said Shetty.
"The coming months will see us define a clear strategy on how we can leverage our understanding of that market to create tangible healthcare assets there."
— With inputs from Himendra Mohan Kumar, Staff Reporter
