India shuns preventive care, but Thyrocare bets it’s a goldmine

Good Morning Jigar,   I have good news. No tortuous segues. No witticisms. No meanderings. Best to get right to it. Because that's how much I love today's story. It's about a company you may have heard little about, called Thyrocare.   So here's the backstory. Thyrocare does medical diagnostics. Mostly preventive care. You know how it works. You send them a sample. They analyse. And send you back the results. Hopefully with good news and a stern warning never to check WebMD again.   Thyrocare has been around since 1996. And it's been doing phenomenally well. It did several things right, but the one thing it did really right was to price itself lower than its competitors. How did it do that? It did something unique. It built one centralised lab. All test samples across the country come to this lab. Economies of scale leads to lower costs. Which leads to lower prices for customers.    So far so good. Then something interesting happened. The same thing that happened to all of us. In transportation. In food-delivery. Everywhere.   Customers started to care less about price and started caring more about time. Thyrocare's centralised, one-lab model meant results took more time. Customers didn't mind paying more to get their results sooner. And a test result is a test result. So, about two years back, Thyrocare decided to expand to build more labs.    Small problem.    More labs didn't lead to more revenue. Why? Because Thyrocare was in the wrong market. Preventive care wasn't growing. But sick care, an adjacent market, was. The company tried to get in there.    Big problem.    Competitors were already entrenched there. And customers saw Thyrocare as a preventive care company. It would be like if Aquafina tried to start a beer brand.    It's a strange quandary. To do everything right, and still go wrong. Ruhi's story talks about how this happened. As Thyrocare's founder, Velumani puts it, "I should be sleeping peacefully, but everyone is asking me questions that make me feel like I must not."    Basically, Thyrocare's biggest trump card is that its prices are the lowest in the market. And it's in a market where the customers don't care much that it is.    But Velumani thinks that may be about to change.    How?    Read our story to find out. You can do that here: https://the-ken.com/story/preventive-care-thyrocares-goldmine/   Regards, Praveen Gopal Krishnan praveen@the-ken.com What you just read is the personalised daily introduction to The Ken's story. Written by a different person each day. Often insightful, sometimes witty, and very rarely boring. Someone sent this to you? Sign up for free. Don't like these? You can unsubscribe. Want to manage your emails? Click here.