As it prepares to roll out 20 new ?Made-in-India? products this year, the Indian arm of General Electric?s healthcare business expects to keep up the pace in product innovation over the next few years, looking to double the share of revenue from homegrown products. Locally designed products contributed about 12% of GE Healthcare?s revenue of $400 million in calendar year 2011.
Since 2008, when it launched a low-cost portable electrocardiogram, GE Healthcare has been focussing on frugal engineering solutions for the Indian market but, in the process, also discovered a ready market for these low-cost innovations in advanced economies.
?In two or three years we will probably have 25% of our revenues coming from products that we designed here. That?s a pretty big statement from an multinational to say that your innovation approach has been so customised that that much of your revenue is generated from things we are doing here,? said Terri Bresenham, president and CEO, South Asia at GE Healthcare, which spends an average of $50 million every year on research and development in India.
The company, which had merged the India operations with long standing partner Wipro to create Wipro GE Healthcare in 2010, expects to outpace the Indian market for healthcare and medical devices which is currently growing at around 14%.
Last year, the company launched 11 products in its focus areas of cardiology, infant care and ultrasound imaging, said Munesh Makhija, chief technology officer, India. ?We are accelerating, we have more in the pipeline,? he said, adding that the development team in Bangalore also focusses on high-end engineering technology for its global markets. ?In fact, that is what gives us the capabilities to innovate at the low-end.?
Bresenham expects the company to keep up the current pace of innovations because of the potential for affordable healthcare in India and with the scope to constantly update the technology on their devices.
For instance, the latest generation of the MAC 400 portable electrocardiogram, introduced in 2008, comes with the capability to store the ECG data on smart cards and which can be easily communicated to a referral centre. ?We are actually selling most of the products in tier three cities to general practitioners for purposes of screening,? said Makhija.
Among GE?s newer products are a pocket ultrasound machine, phototherapy systems aimed at treating infant jaundice and an incubator that can be heated in a microwave. The company said it is also working on a PET/CT scanner that can detect cancer at its earliest stage besides developing algorithms for ultrasound machines that can help automate the measurement of key parameters of a foetus, something which is done manually by a practitioner at present.