India's Health Tech Advantage: Building Real Value Beyond Discounts

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My NoSmalltalk session with Mahendra Singh

by Albert Schiller

The Quiet Kind of Builder

Conventional business wisdom, especially in price-sensitive markets like India, often champions aggressive pricing and discounts as primary tools for success. Undercutting competitors seems the standard path. Yet, reflecting on three decades within the intricate Indian healthcare technology landscape, Mahendra Singh presents a compelling alternative strategy.

His experience demonstrates achieving market leadership not despite, but because of, championing high-value, premium technology (often sophisticated German systems) at prices significantly higher than competitors. This approach challenges the notion that price is the ultimate lever, offering instead a powerful case study in value-based strategy grounded in deep expertise and dedicated customer education.

Moving Beyond the Discount Model

Entering the health tech space in 1993, Mahendra encountered an "untapped market" perceived as highly complex. He observed large multinational corporations attempting standard market tactics, mistakenly assuming scale alone could navigate this nuanced field, often leading to failure. He noted a common approach among competitors, including major players: engaging in price wars or offering technology at minimal cost, hoping primarily to gain market share.

Mahendra consciously rejected this path. Guided by experience and insight, he operated on the principle that relying on discounts leads to unsustainability. "Today, if you give a discount right tomorrow you will not survive because you are having no margin to survive," he explained, adding that the hope of future gains rarely materializes when the initial foundation is weak. He found that deep discounts can diminish respect and create unsustainable customer expectations, potentially harming the business long-term. His firm stance against discounts became a core operational tenet, even within a market often perceived as primarily price-driven.

Delivering Solutions, Not Just Specifications

How did he thrive selling products significantly more expensive than established names? The key was shifting the focus entirely from price to total value and comprehensive solutions. Mahendra emphasizes delivering solutions meticulously tailored to solve specific customer problems, requiring an understanding far deeper than conventional sales.

He highlights the unique demands of health tech:

Informed Decision-Makers: Engaging with highly educated, experienced senior physicians and department heads requires profound clinical understanding and peer-level communication.

Critical Stakes: Technology directly impacts patient health and safety, making quality and reliability non-negotiable, unlike commodity sales.

Contextual Nuance: Technology performance varies across settings; solutions effective elsewhere need careful adaptation for the Indian context.

Mastering this required Singh, initially a "hardcore technologist," to immerse himself in clinical applications, physician language, business economics, and local complexities. Armed with this end-to-end expertise, his approach became centered on customer education.

Education as a Strategic Advantage

By clearly demonstrating how technologically superior, albeit more expensive, solutions delivered better long-term economics, improved clinical outcomes, and enhanced patient safety, Singh effectively reframed the value proposition. He shifted the dialogue from upfront cost to lifetime value and risk management. This educational strategy, backed by deep domain knowledge, allowed him to build strong positions against lower-priced competitors focused primarily on cost or simply supplying hardware without ensuring optimal application and support.

He built credibility not by being the cheapest, but by being the provider who truly understood the customer's multifaceted problem – clinical, economic, and operational – offering robust, justifiable solutions.

Mahendra Singh's experience powerfully illustrates that price isn't always the deciding factor, even in cost-aware markets. In complex, high-stakes sectors like healthcare technology, deep domain expertise, a solutions-focused mindset, and a commitment to educating customers on total value can forge a significant competitive advantage, enabling premium offerings to succeed against established, lower-cost alternatives. His strategic commitment was fundamentally about delivering and articulating superior, holistic value.

4 Lessons with practical value.

What's next?

Mahendra Singh isn’t building for praise—he’s building for permanence. In our upcoming magazine May feature of Alba's NoSmalltalk, we dive deeper into how his quiet architecture has shaped some of India’s most relied-upon public systems. And if you want to understand why “moving fast” sometimes breaks more than it builds, don’t miss the next blog—where Mahendra unpacks the real cost of rushing innovation.