NEW DELHI: To expand its presence in Asia, the Apollo Hospitals Group has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Fawaz Al Hokair Group of Saudi Arabia to set up three 250-bed hospitals and 20 clinics in the Kingdom over the next three years.

"Saudi Arabia represents the largest market in the Middle East and we are confident of tapping this opportunity,'' said Apollo Hospitals Group founder-chairman Prathap C. Reddy at a press conference here on Wednesday.

Under the agreement, the Fawaz Al Hokair Group will make all the investments and the Apollo group will provide the complete technical know-how for which it will get a one-time fee of 1.8 million dollars. The total cost of the project has been estimated at 100 million dollars, of which each hospital will incur an expenditure of 20 million dollars and each clinic will require 1.5 million dollars.

For the operational phase, Apollo will also get royalties of 3 per cent of the total revenues under the seven-year deal term.

"Apollo Hospitals will be closely involved in the operations by providing support in marketing plans and will monitor the performance of these facilities to ensure that the highest levels of clinical and service qualities are maintained,'' Dr. Reddy said.

New high-power scanner

Meanwhile, Indraprastha Apollo Hospital in Delhi has announced installation of a high-power 3.0 Tesla MRI scanner with an advanced parallel imaging computer system, enabling the hospital to offer to its patients twice the field strength of most conventional MRI scanners.

"The 3T MRI scanner offers a much higher resolution and greater contrast, which means we can now detect much smaller abnormalities such as multiple sclerosis plaques, brain tumours and strokes that cannot be seen on a conventional scanner ,'' said Dr. Prathap C. Reddy.

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