Dr. Suneeta Reddy

Company: Apollo Hospitals Group
Title: Managing Director
Industry: Health care
Hometown: Chennai, India
Notable in 2023: Spearheading the digital transformation and continued growth of India's largest hospital system.

India's health-care market is estimated at a size of roughly $400 billion, and yet there was no corporate business model in the market until Apollo Hospitals Group was created in the 1980s.

As a part of the founding family which began with one hospital, Suneeta Reddy has played a leading role in helping Apollo Hospitals grow into a huge player on the Asian health-care landscape. It's the largest integrated healthcare network in India, with 73 hospitals, a workforce of over 100,000, 6,000-plus pharmacies, over 200 clinics and over 2,200 diagnostic centers, and 25 million users on its digital health platform.

Reddy, who rose through the ranks of the family-founded company's financial and strategy departments, and completed a management program at Harvard Business School, played a key role in bringing the first foreign direct investment to the Indian health-care market and took the company through an early public offering on the international market.

Foreign direct investment is expected to play a key role in the hospitals sector in India in the years ahead, according to the U.S. Department of Trade, with current estimates that India will require up to 1.75 million more hospital beds by the end of 2025.

Suneeta and her three sisters, Preetha Reddy, Sangita Reddy, and Shobana Kamineni, have all served at the company founded by their father in 1983, and the female-centric leadership has filtered down throughout the company, where over 55% of employees and 31% of leaders are women.

"With the knowledge that we have, and the ability to do so much more, women are intuitive and creative and passionate, and with all the skills and advantages we have, it's our time to shine," Reddy said in a recent video interview.

With India's health-care market poised to grow alongside its world-leading population by hundreds of billions of dollars in the years ahead, Apollo's overarching goal is to provide care across cardiac, oncology, neurology, robotics & pediatrics at one-tenth the cost of international health care, and extend that model to all Asian countries. Reddy is a key policy advocate for Indian health care at highest levels, including at the United Nations, and serves on the Harvard Business School medical advisory board, as well as a World Economic Forum global economic advisory group.

Reddy's idea of business success is straightforward, as she recently related in the video interview: "Working with a purpose in mind, and not just in health care, in all those businesses that have really done well, those that are driven by purpose and keeping in mind the value we bring to all stakeholders. For us in health care, it's the patients, but it's also the value to the people who have enlisted with us, the doctors and clinicians, and continually keeping that value proposition alive."

In the past year, the health-care company has expanded its genomics, oncology and pediatrics networks. Among her ongoing goals, Reddy says, is to work with device partners and educational institutions including the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras to reengineer medical devices so India's growing medical devices sector become a more accessible and affordable option for Asian and African countries, making India and the region less reliant on imports.