I recently had dinner with Dr Devi Shetty, the founder of Narayana Hospitals. For those who don’t know him, he’s the guy who figured out how to do open heart surgery for a few hundred dollars when the same procedure costs a bomb in the US. Narayana has 18,000 beds across India, and if you ask most middle-class people in Bangalore about it, they’ll speak highly of it.

There was one thing I kept thinking about over and over again after meeting him.

Narayana’s market cap is around ₹38,000 crore. Now compare that to pretty much any half-decent financial services business in India, and it’ll be valued more than that, including Zerodha. A brokerage, worth more than a hospital chain, that has probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

I get the arguments. If you’re a fund manager/analyst, you can immediately explain it away using margins, capex, asset-light vs asset-heavy, and all that, and I’m not saying the market is wrong.

But it’s still a strange world we’ve built, where the businesses closest to money get valued the highest, and the ones doing the hard and essential things get priced like boring utilities. A hospital carries physical infrastructure, enormous liability, thin margins and the actual weight of keeping people alive. And somehow that’s worth less than a platform for buying and selling stocks.

I don’t have a clean take on this. All of this just felt odd.

Ps: Nothing here is investment advice. For that, go to Zerodha Varsity

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