Medical holding Medscan, one of the shareholders of which is the company Rosatom Healthcare, which is part of Rosatom, sold a 49% stake in Medscan Lab LLC to Sberbank Investments. According to SPARK-Interfax, the deal was closed on June 2. Sberbank and Medscan did not respond to Vedomosti’s requests.
A subsidiary of Medscan, Medscan Lab, manages laboratory centers based on the holding’s multidisciplinary clinics in Moscow, Kursk, and Perm. At the end of 2022, Medscan bought the KDL network from the UFG Private Equit fund, which included 13 laboratories and over 350 medical offices in more than 40 cities of Russia. According to SPARK-Interfax, they are managed by Medscan Lab. Already this year, 55 Novascreen laboratories have joined the KDL network, it was said earlier on the latter’s website. The structure of this transaction is still not clear.
Medscan was created in 2014 by Evgeny Tugolukov. It includes 58 medical centers in 20 regions. Among them are diagnostic centers, hospitals with a surgical hospital, multidisciplinary and specialized clinics, including oncological ones. The flagship asset of the group is a branch of the Israeli hospital Hadassah.
For what purpose Sberbank Investments acquired a stake in Medscan Lab is not exactly known. One of the consultants points out that bank structures are quite often included in the authorized capital of their borrowers, which allows them to control processes in companies and influence decision-making. In this case, such transactions are cashless. But, according to consultants, as a rule, we are talking about the acquisition of shares in the amount of 1-5%. According to SPARK-Interfax, the subsidiary of Medscan Lab, Diagnostics LLC, has been pledged to Sberbank Investments since the beginning of 2023.
RNC Pharma Development Director Nikolay Bespalov and DSM Group CEO Sergey Shulyak admit that the investor acquired a stake in the network of laboratories on market terms. The cost of 49% of Medscan Lab is estimated by Mikhail Burmistrov, General Director of Infoline-analytics, at about 3 billion rubles. The real amount of the transaction could be less, since Sberbank acts as its creditor, he noted.
RUB 13.6 billion
amounted to the revenue of the KDL network, which is part of the Medscan holding, in 2021. According to this indicator, it took 4th place in the rating of the largest Russian laboratory companies compiled by the industry publication Vademecum. Only Invitro (39.2 billion rubles), Gemotest (28.2 billion rubles) and Helix (23.8 billion rubles) had more.
According to Shulyak, now there are not so many businesses where one could invest their money. Given the active development of Medscan, this may be one of them, the expert says. Bespalov also believes that in this case we are talking about a portfolio investment, which involves exiting the asset at a certain point with profit taking. Shulyak does not rule out that the Medscan laboratories will even enter the Sberbank ecosystem. Today, the bank is already engaged in insurance (through Sberbank Insurance. – Vedomosti) and provides services, including VHI, so buying a stake in such an asset is a logical step, the expert summed up. If we are talking about the integration of Medscan Lab into the Sberbank ecosystem, then this means that the company expects further growth of its business and expansion of the range of services.
Sberbank Investments often invest in various assets. Thus, in 2020, the company became the owner of 50% of the Vesper developer’s projects in Moscow – the Fairmont & Vesper hotel and residential complex (25,500 sq. m.) near the Mayakovskaya metro station and the Lucky residential complex (189,000 sq. m.) from the metro station “Ulitsa 1905 Goda”. According to SPARK-Interfax, the company also owns, for example, large shares in the startup Vtorium (collects payments for scrap and recyclables) and the Gzhel association (produces porcelain).
