India can emerge as the main market for medical business: Atsushi Horiba

Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld spoke to Atsushi Horiba, Chairman and Group CEO, Horiba Ltd, Kyoto, Japan to know more about the role of technology in healthcare and its business potential.

Technology Impacting Healthcare
Earlier, we cared about instruments served for medical purposes, but these days how to handle the data after you got the instrument, that is a kind of management. Therefore, total hospital management and doctor’s management is the kind of key for the future.

Also, in the past, we checked that if patient is sick or not? but for the future we have to analyze what kind of problem the patient has and this kind of approach is more important.

Healthcare Technology: Future
Future for a personal sensor or a personal medical instrument might be key, not just for hospital or doctor's office. This is a kind of an approach for future, cost might be lower than current condition.

Horiba Healthcare
Our first product was the pH meter, after that we developed gas analyzer. Most popular product for us is Automotive Emission Gas Analyzer. We have around 80% of the market share globally. We also have mass flowmeter for the semiconductor industry.

We would now like to approach for medical market strongly. We are a kind of analyzer company, so we can approach automotive, semiconductor, medical, environment and scientific research. I think we have quite a great future.

As far as healthcare product is concerned, there are still so many spaces for us to develop. Therefore, how we can work for medical school and doctors, that is the most important for our future.

Horiba- Business in India
The Indian market for us is the most important market in the world. Of course it is growing and the population is big. We respect the Indian market and we would like to invest. India has a variety of areas, so approaching each state and area, might be our challenge.

At this moment, for example, the European and the US are quite a big market, but for the future, India and China might be the main market for a medical business.