Arcapita Bank has completed the sale of MedPlus Health Services, an Indian healthcare company, to a consortium of private equity investors, after a holding period of 3 years.

Arcapita became the largest shareholder in MedPlus in November 2007 in a transaction that valued the company at Rs2.9 billion ($72 million).

Arcapita acquired its stake in MedPlus as part of its strategy to develop a private equity portfolio in the high growth Indian market, and this is the first exit from that portfolio. During the holding period, the number of stores grew by 350 per cent to 800, revenues grew 5-fold and gross profit increased 6-fold.

“Generally, India has continued to grow steadily through the downturn, and we are pleased that this has been reflected in the performance of MedPlus since acquisition,” said Atif A. Abdulmalik, Arcapita’s chief executive officer.

“We’ve worked closely with the management team to develop the scale of the business and to expand geographically, succeeding in simultaneously growing revenue and improving margins,” added Ranjeev Bhatia, head of Arcapita’s India and Middle East focused private equity group.

Arcapita maintains a positive outlook on India as an attractive investment environment.

“Throughout India, we continue to see opportunities in each of our asset classes of private equity, real estate and infrastructure. We are investing further resources to develop our business there and to satisfy what we believe is growing investor demand for high quality Indian investments,” stated Abdulmalik.-TradeArabia News Service