The main barriers to pet care are inadequate pet insurance and the lack of novel drugs:Arun Vasudevan, MaxPetZ, ET HealthWorld

Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld, spoke to Arun Vasudevan, CEO, MaxPetZ, to figure out the trends and challenges impacting the pet care sector.

Pet Healthcare Market
The pet healthcare market in India is at a significant inflection point. When I say that, what I mean is that there are several factors, which are secular trends, that have changed the direction of how the market is picking up. These are rising incomes, nuclear families, delayed children, COVID triggers, and rapid urbanisation. All these put together have created a way of life change, a significant change in attitudes from a pet owner to a pet parent, and this has resulted in pet humanization. And humanization is an emerging trend, especially among millennials.

If we delve a little further into what results in this, the market has changed significantly in the last 5 years, and these same trends are also observed globally. For example, today in India, there are 33,000,000 pets, of which 90% are dogs. But the growth in the last five years has been significant. If I look at the cat population, that has almost doubled from 1.5 million to over 3,000,000. And the dog population has similarly increased by 65% in the last 5 years. Furthermore, adoption rates have increased significantly. According to statistics, Now, about 6,00,000 adoptions take place, and this does not include purchases.

Pet Healthcare: Challenges
The current process to register new drugs, which are in general available abroad, takes over 3 years, and it’s also fairly capital intensive. This poses a significant problem for providing quality care to our companion animals. Furthermore, if one were to avail of these drugs, the number of people to procure them would become extremely limited, and this would hamper the quality of care as well.Another significant challenge that the industry faces today is the very low penetration of pet insurance, which is driven by a lack of awareness of the benefits of pet insurance. Like human insurance, which took its own sweet time in a while to increase penetration in India over 15 years from under 0.5% to currently about 5%, pet insurance is negligible. This creates a significant, again, gap in the quality of treatment that is provided to animals because certain surgeries are expensive and the significant cash outlay many people cannot afford. And this really impacts the quality of care a pet parent wants to provide the pet, but just from a cash flow perspective, it’s a significant hindrance.Pet Healthcare: Telemedicine
We have a very broad view of telemedicine. Although it has been a game changer, increasing access to veterinarians has improved the quality of care, but the efficacy of telemedicine is fairly limited. What we hope in the next few years is that technology will enable solutions such as wearables or real-time monitoring. Real empirical data is provided to the vet to provide the right prognosis at the right time to improve the quality of care. Today, we are at a stage where that is significantly missing.

MaxPetZ:Journey so far
We at MaxPetz are pioneers in the pet healthcare business in India with over 70 years of experience. Our legacy is providing quality healthcare and wellness to all companion animals we see. Our mission is to improve their access to and quality of care across the country. To achieve this, we plan to expand. Having said that, we have done the first pet brain surgery in the country. Similarly, we were the first to implant a pacemaker in a dog, and we are continuing to innovate by bringing in newer and newer types of treatments. For example, total hip replacement, mitral valve implantation, and what we would like to envision looking ahead to is being able to provide pet parents across the country with such quality care from your primary care to tertiary care. Just like we say, we are your trusted family vet who provides super-specialty animal care.