Katya Zubareva:
International consolidation is a hugely important theme as well in the space that I work in. So there comes a point when a provider, and let's take fertility clinics, for example, gets big enough in a single country and owns a large enough share of the market that in order to grow, they want to go and look at other markets internationally. So we quite often spend time looking at 20 different European countries and selecting the best one for our particular client to participate in. And the fit there can be very different depending on the client you're working with. So you could be looking for a country where you can take your affordable private proposition into, or you could be looking for a country where there is some regulatory arbitrage.
So that's definitely the case in fertility because different countries have very different rules about what exact treatments you're allowed to do. And then once we figured out where they want to go and what they would be buying in that country, whether it's another large player or small clinics being rolled up into platform, then we also help them think through the synergies of doing so and what would be the actual benefits of being in international play and what can you achieve in each particular situation. The international synergies that you can have do vary by sector quite a lot.
So sometimes you're looking at mostly procurement synergies, whether it be drugs and vets, or equipment, big MRI scanners, CT scanners, et cetera. And in other sectors, you don't have that much of the procurement synergy, but you can still develop best practices and spread these best practices across the network. So if you know how to do fertility treatments really well and get really good success rates, and you've documented how to do them in one country, you can then transplant them to use services in other countries and improve the provision there.
Clinician engagement, patient proposition, central systems, and any digital provision that you have developed, all these big chunks of the operating model, you can't theoretically transplant to other geographies. But again, the trick is in the detail as always. And you have to find the right countries where the benefits you have, the benefits of scale that you have are most important and most relevant. So we help our clients think through all of those issues, including where to buy, when to buy, and what to buy when they go internationally.
