Creating a global MedTech leader from a domestic player – Marco Bonaiti discusses the Apax Funds’ partnership with Healthium

Healthium is a MedTech company that develops, manufactures and sells a broad range of surgical consumables and devices to customers across the world. Its end-users are surgeons, and its products enable treatments including wound closure, advanced wound care and joint surgery.

In Healthium, we saw the opportunity to transform a local Indian player into a global MedTech business. Healthium offered high-quality wound closure products but was mostly focused on the domestic market and had a narrow portfolio.

Thanks to the Apax Funds’ long track record of investing in MedTech, we saw the opportunity to build on the existing product range to create a more complete and innovative portfolio, and to invest in the expansion of the commercial footprint. Today, one-in-five surgeries in the world uses Healthium products.

The Apax Funds helped the company to bolster its management team and add deep industry experience to support its growth. This included the appointment of Anish Bafna as CEO and Vishal Maheshwari as CFO, two very seasoned market executives.

During the ownership period, the Apax Funds reshaped the company’s portfolio to focus exclusively on surgical consumables and devices and invested in R&D to support the launch of several new products - including an internally developed arthroscopy franchise that has already become the third largest in India. In addition, thanks to Apax Funds’ investments, Healthium expanded its presence to over 90 countries, becoming a truly global player.

Healthcare in India has been a fruitful investment sector for private equity, historically mostly in care services and pharma, although MedTech has been growing in prominence. We expect this to continue: healthcare players in India can count on a large and fast-growing domestic market, but also on high-quality regulatory and manufacturing expertise at low cost. We should continue to see the rapid scale-up of many more Indian-based healthcare companies in the years to come.