CHENNAI: In 1970, there was no kindergarten in Chinnalapatti, a small town in Dindigul, but S Gomathy Babu, a librarian and a socialist at heart, wanted to send his two-and-a-half-year-old son to school. So, the boy joined Class I where the other children were double his age.
The early start must have helped his journey to where G S K Velu is today: at the helm of Trivitron Healthcare, a group with a turnover of 3,500 crore. The group includes Neuberg Diagnostics, 15 manufacturing facilities of Trivitron in India and abroad, and Maxvision eyecare chain.
It also has JVs with Apollo Hospitals for dental and dialysis chains. Velu is also the largest shareholder of Kauvery Hospitals, which operates 10 hospitals across Tamil Nadu and is set to add three more. Velu was born to a poor family in Aralvaimozhi near Nagercoil. “My father didn’t have a bike. He didn’t even have a bank account. All he had was debt,” says Velu.
“I was caliberated to start life much ahead of my peers.” He went to Tamil medium schools in Madurai for primary and high school classes before shifting to English medium for higher education in Nagercoil. “I walked 10km a day to catch a bus to school and back. We had to travel 16km to Nagercoil to see a doctor,” he says. Velu wanted to become a doctor.
He was among the first batch to appear for a medical entrance exam in 1984. He scored 98% in Class XII, but when it came to the medical entrance he got 43. “Students from city schools got 48 or 49, and grabbed all the seats,” he says. Velu headed for BITS Pilani to do a pharmacy course. “Though it was called pharmacy, the course was all about biomedical engineering.
I did the last six months internship with Dr Shanta at Cancer Hospital, Adyar. BITS Pilani and Dr Shanta changed my perception of life and set me on the road to success,” he says. With no money to do higher studies abroad, 20-year-old Velu joined a medical devices company. He established his first lab in Kochi in partnership with his boss in 1991 and went on to float Trivitron in 1997 to distribute medical devices in India for leading global players.
Around the same time, he established Metropolis in JV with a partner. “Both Metropolis and Trivitron grew between 1998 and 2008, and global players wanted to partner with us. Then India opened up and foreign players opted to set up their own bases here. I bet on manufacturing medical devices and established India’s first medical park over 25 acres near Sriperumbudur in 2011.
Today with three manufacturing units, we make 250 medical devices and cater to both domestic and overseas markets,” says Velu. Trivitron is now one of the largest homegrown players for medical devices. At least one or two of its devices are sold in 180 countries. “Now 95% of our profits come from manufacturing and within that two-thirds comes from abroad,” says Velu.
Exit from Metropolis in 2015 left him with a sizeable cash pile, which Velu used to launch Maxvision, establish JVs with Apollo and buy out most investors in Trivitron, pump money in the Kauvery Hospitals chain and launch a fund to invest in new entities. “Instead of debts, I preferred equity investors and gave them returns. I saw private investors make huge returns on their investments in my companies and decided to establish a fund myself to invest in new age digital companies,” says Velu.
What next? “We are working on devices that will be sought after a decade from now. Personalised medicine is the future. People prefer everything on their mobile phones.
We are working on those digital strategies, even while gearing up to list our group entities in stock markets. Starting with Neuberg this year, we will hit the markets over the next five years with a series of IPOs for Maxvision, Kauvery and Trivitron. By that time, our turnover would touch 10,000 crore,” says Velu.
