The company also sees demand increasing for its connected care solutions amid the Covid-19 pandemic and will work towards more public-private-partnerships (PPP) in this space.
Dutch healthtech and consumer electronics company Philips said it will invest Rs 250-300 crore to boost its manufacturing and R&D facilities in India. The company also intends to hire 1,000 people over the next two to three years, adding to its existing workforce of over 6,000 people.
“Even as we work through the current crisis, we are focused on the future and are investing towards it,” Daniel Mazon, vice chairman and managing director for Indian subcontinent at Philips India, told ET.
He said the company will expand its factory near Pune by 7,200 sq ft to start manufacturing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and x-ray equipment. Philips is also building a new 650,000 sq ft campus in Bengaluru that can house over 5,000 people. It will be ready by 2023.
The company also sees demand increasing for its connected care solutions amid the Covid-19 pandemic and will work towards more public-private-partnerships (PPP) in this space.
“We currently have about 100 PPPs in India in radiology and cardiology and would like to add more in connected care,” said Mazon. The aim is to ramp this up to 200 such partnerships over the next year or so. “We will combine IT and hardware to create a very strong solution in connected healthcare,” Mazon said, adding that this also ties in with the ‘Make in India’ initiative.
The connected care solutions will combine hardware like monitors and ventilators to patient monitoring and access systems to provide better healthcare outcomes. This will also help hospitals in smaller towns connect to a speciality hospital in a larger city. The company is talking to various state governments to start implementing this, especially as healthcare will start shifting to a more remote model as a result of this pandemic.
Philips has been using its Healthcare Innovation Centre in Pune as a hub to export to several countries across the world, and Mazon said the company will look at exporting the new product lines out of India as well. The HIC focuses on end-to-end product development and manufacturing for key product lines like ultrasound machines and mobile surgery units.
