“We are looking at increasing the volume of business, in order to be able to bring in more automation in cleaning and deliver better and faster services.
“The South is a growing market; the end users are more cleanliness conscious and want cleaner work atmosphere.”
“There are more opportunities in Bangalore. Where we have big hospitals like Apollo and Narayanguru, there are smaller ones which are more like boutique hospitals with scope for professional cleaning,” observed Bharathi Kamath, Carewel Facilities India Pvt Ltd.
The three largest hospital chains – Manipal, Apollo and Fortis have about 33 hospitals in tier-II and III towns, such as Kangra, Raigad, Moradabad, Salem and Visakhapatnam.
With the kind of buildings coming up in Bangalore and Hyderabad – tech parks, residential blocks, gated communities – there is huge potential for maintenance services.
Apollo announced in January this year that it was going to invest `10,000 crore in building 250 Apollo Reach Hospitals smaller hospitals – other than the 51 in big cities – in tier-II towns such as Karimnagar in Andhra Pradesh.
In a major single investment spree, HealthCare Global Enterprise Limited (HCG), a Bangalore-based pan-India chain of super-specialty cancer care hospitals, is planning to expand its network to 40 centres by 2014. HCG, at present, has around 24 centres in India and one each in Uganda and Nairobi. It has plans to open four to five centres in metro cities, and around 10 in tier-II and III towns by 2014.
“Even hospitals which were going for manpower suppliers earlier are now elevating standards to meet competition and outsourcing maintenance to organised service providers,” said Vishwanath S Prabhu, Regional Head of Tenon Facility Services.
The South is a growing market; the end users are more cleanliness conscious and want cleaner work atmosphere. We want to bring in more automation in cleaning so that the services are delivered much better and faster.
Automobile/Foundry
Karnataka is the fourth largest automobile producing state of India and has created major hubs in cities like Bangalore Rural, Ramanagara, Kolar, Shimoga, Dharwad and Belgaum.
As the foundry industry feeds the automobile sector, more than 50% of the country’s machine tools industry is located here. Aeronautical is another industry concentrated in Karnataka.
Tamil Nadu has planned for a major development with industrial corridors coming up in cities, including Ranipet, Hosur, Trichy, Coimbatore, Madurai, Salem and Thoothukudi.
Other industries like food processing, food parks, cement and steel are coming up in smaller cities of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
Retail industry
Retail space is growing at a much faster pace with the mall culture seeping even in smaller towns. Max Hypermarkets will be starting six to seven stores – most of these will be in Mangalore, Mysore, Vishakhapatnam, Vijayawada, and Coimbatore. The company will be investing in large stores in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai and New Delhi.
Red Sky, originally being an UK company, I have been handling the India operations, basically to service international clients here.
“In fact, smaller B2 towns like Hubli, Mysore, Hassan, are coming up with malls,” said Bharathi. Tandem Allied Services has recently ventured into retail is planning to adding more.
