Spiritus Mundi plc (LON:SPMU) Consultant Kon Gryllakis caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss his background and experience, why he joined the company and what targets they will be seeking.
Q1: Kon, you joined the company as a strategic consultant, could you just tell us a bit about yourself and perhaps your background?
A1: So, Kon is short for Konstantinos, you can probably guess I’m of Greek origin, that’s where I was born but I actually grew up in Melbourne in Australia.
I completed my science degree there and worked in the diagnostics industry pretty much for most of my early days in Australia, originally with Abbot Diagnostics and then with Bayer Diagnostics, sales & marketing, until eventually I was the General Manager of Bayer Diagnostics in Australia.
Moving on from there, I was then promoted to Japan where I had a Japan organisation for 5 years and then returned back to Australia with a different company, in a different industry.
More recently, I’ve spent the last 7 years with Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics as Head of Asia Pacific, based in Singapore.
Q2: Plenty of experience mentioned there but how does your experience fit with Spiritus Mundi, and what will you be doing for the company?
A2: What I’ll be doing is looking at opportunities across the Asian region where we can look at pulling together laboratories, acquiring the right labs that we believe fit into our strategic vision. Certainly, we would like to disrupt the industry in some way in the way we go about forming our organisation and acquiring the right laboratories, in the right location.
Q3: What attracted you to join the company?
A3: Well, I think their approach is one that really resonated with me.
I’ve been in the industry a long time and even in the last 7 years within the Asian region, I’ve seen a lot of players coming in and looking at establishing themselves in the region. The approach they usually take is one of just try and build as much volume and then negotiate better pricing and try and compete through just basically that approach.
What I liked about the company is that the approach is more patient-centric, it’s more providing an integrated platform, an integrated solution which involves not just laboratory testing but how we manage that data. You’ve access back to the patient, their clinicians, their GP’s so that we really impact healthcare in a much stronger way and a much patient-centric way than what I’ve seen before.
So, that approach really resonated with me.
Q4: Can we just clarify a little, can you elaborate a little bit more on what sort of targets Spiritus Mundi is seeking and why you think these are in attractive areas?
A4: First of all, the targets themselves would be small to medium sized laboratories, usually they would have a very strong and solid foundation in the relevant countries, they would have no doubt loyalty built up over many years but maybe struggling to take that business forward at a larger scale.
Healthcare is becoming more and more complex, there’s increased regulatory pressures and demands on laboratories, there’s this increased competition, we saw what impact something like an epidemic can do. So, I guess these laboratories would not be able to scale up and continue in this new world of pathology testing.
That’s where I think we can offer something unique by using expertise that we would have within our organisation to make them best-in-class so that’s where we see we can make a real difference.
Also, in some of these countries, whilst they may be at an earlier phase of evolution, the more developed countries where we will also be having a lot of our resources and pulling the team together from, we will have the expertise in more developed areas that we can bring in as well.
So, I guess we’ll take that dual approach where we can add value, both in terms of our expertise and the team are pulling together that has that, in addition to where there’s some gaps with those particular targets that we’ll be talking to.
