For close to a decade, Ranjan Pai has been on the lookout to buy all the hospitals that fell within his blitzscaling path. Amid hits and misses, he’s reached the finish line.

On 23 March, as the IPO papers dropped, it became evident that the chairman of Manipal Health Enterprises has created a lattice of all the acquired hospital beds and strung them together with tidy numbers.

As the hospital chain with the widest geographical footprint across 14 states and union territories, Manipal pips Apollo Hospitals Enterprise to the post in the number of beds and revenue (the latter’s standalone). It also rubs shoulders with the stock-market darling, Max Healthcare. Manipal’s Ebitda margins, a metric that Pai considers central to his healthcare business thesis, at around 27% is the same as Max’s and nearly double Apollo’s.

Incidentally, the draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) also lists “adjusted EbitdaAdjusted EBITDA calculates a company's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation, but without including non-recurring, irregular, or non-cash items”—a metric that The Ken has writtenThe KenZomato, Firstcry, and others love this ‘magical’ number. You should hate it is more “magic reality than reality”—that is just about a percentage point lower.

“That the two Ebitda numbers are nearly the same means they don’t have too many adjustments, and that there is no money being made outside the hospital. Manipal is being transparent about its business,” said a managing partner at a healthcare-focused private-equity fund, which has invested in more than a dozen hospitals. “[Ranjan Pai] is the only guy in Indian healthcare who’s pulled off a massive consolidation with such numbers.”

Out of the Rs 8,000 crore ($852 million) of fresh issue, Rs 5,378 crore will be used to pay off debt, and another Rs 574 crore to buy additional stakes in Sahayadri Hospitals. The newest acquisition in Western India is also the one straining the group financially.

In an earlier interviewThe KenManipal to Medanta: Will Ranjan Pai finally break the no-deal jinx? with The Ken, Pai had lamented the “single-digit [profit] margins” of all the listed hospitals.

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