Page 38 - bne_May 2021_20210501

38 I Southeast Europe bne May 2021
The new number 1 in Romania’s private medical sector
Clare Nuttall in Glasgow
Regina Maria overtook rival MedLife to become the biggest player in the Romanian private medical services market by turnover in 2020. Now its private equity backer Mid Europa Partners plans to build
it up further into a company of systemic scale.
According to 2020 results for the two companies, Regina Maria’s turnover shot up by 27% in 2020 to €237mn, while MedLife’s consolidated turnover rose by a more modest but still robust 11.5% to RON1.08bn (€220mn).
Both rivals have been expanding aggressively in an expanding market. In Romania, as in much of Central and Southeast Europe, demand for private medical care has been steadily growing among the expanding and increasingly affluent middle class. Pre-pandemic, demand for private medical services
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was spurred on by Romanians looking for better alternatives to the poorly funded and scandal-hit state healthcare service, as well as companies keen to offer private healthcare as a benefit to attract and retain employees, especially in highly competitive sectors like IT.
Mid Europa took over Regina Maria in 2015, from fellow private equity investor Advent International, which had bought into the company, then called Centrul Medical Unirea, or CMU, in 2010.
According to Matthew Strassberg, partner at Mid Europa, the firm has been
investing into private pay healthcare services in Central and Eastern Europe for more than a decade “We started in Poland with Luxmed when it was still
a relatively small chain of clinics that
we built up to the number one position and sold to Bupa. That was our initial exposure to the huge opportunity of backing the roll-up strategy in the region around private healthcare,” Strassberg told bne IntelliNews.
“We think one of the unique features in the region is the large unmet demand from the growing middle class, who pay national insurance contributions but
“Regina Maria’s turnover shot up by 27% in 2020 to €237mn, while MedLife’s consolidated turnover also rose by 11.5% to €220mn"