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 find out the trends and challenges affecting the pet care sector.

Pet Health Care Market
The pet healthcare market in India is at a significant turning point. When I say that, I mean there are some factors, which are secular trends, that have changed the direction of how the market is going up. These are rising incomes, nuclear families, delayed children, COVID triggers, and rapid urbanization. All of this combined has created a life-changing approach, a significant shift in attitudes from a pet owner to a pet parent, and it has resulted in the humanization of the pet. And humanization is an emerging trend, especially among millennials.

If we examine a little more what its results are, the market has changed a lot in the last 5 years, and the same trends are also being followed around the world. 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 almost doubled from 1.5 million to over 3,000,000. And the dog population has also increased by 65% ​​in the last 5 years. Furthermore, adoption rates have increased significantly. According to statistics, Today, approximately 6,00,000 adoptions are taking place, and this does not include purchases.

Pet Health Care: Challenges
The current process to register new drugs, which are generally available abroad, takes more than 3 years, and is relatively capital intensive. This poses a major problem in providing quality care to our companion animals. Furthermore, if one avails of these drugs, the number of people who buy them will be very limited, and this will also hinder the quality of care.

Another significant challenge facing the industry today is the very low penetration of pet insurance, driven by a lack of awareness of the benefits of pet insurance. Like human insurance, which has taken its own sweet time for a while to increase penetration in India over 15 years from under 0.5% to currently around 5%, pet insurance is negligible . This creates a significant, again, gap in the quality of treatment given to animals because some operations are expensive and the huge cost that many people cannot afford. And it really affects the quality of care that a pet parent wants to give to the pet, but just from a cash flow perspective, it’s a huge hurdle.

Pet Health Care: Telemedicine
We have a very broad perspective on telemedicine. Although this is a game changer, increased access to veterinarians has improved the quality of care, but the effectiveness of telemedicine is somewhat limited. What we expect 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 veterinarian 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 disappearing.MaxPetZ: The 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 health care and wellness to all companion animals we see. Our mission is to improve their access and quality of care across the country. To achieve this, we plan to expand. With that said, 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 continue to innovate by bringing newer and newer types of treatment. For example, total hip replacement, mitral valve implantation, and what we would like to see in the future is to be able to provide pet parents across the country with that quality care from your primary care to tertiary care. As we say, we are your trusted family veterinarian providing super-specialized animal care.