The finance minister’s human reproduction business, FutureLife, was conceived in May 2014. The embryo is now in its third trimester and growing nicely. Meanwhile, its competitors are miscarrying.



Survival of the fittest

Never mind his chickens, Andrej Babis is sitting on the country’s largest supply of artificially inseminated human eggs.

It all began in May 2014. FutureLife is a daughter company of Hartenberg Holding, the fund that manages the private wealth of our finance minister. Eight months ago, it acquired control of the Czech Republic’s leading provider of assisted reproductive medicine, Brno-based Reprofit, together with Prague's largest private gynaecological clinic, Gyncentrum.

In August 2014, as FutureLife entered its second trimester, it acquired Iscare IVF. In November 2014, now in its third trimester, FutureLife acquired Sanus, which owns three more IVF clinics, in Hradec Kralove, Pardubice and Jihlava. And in December 2014, FutureLife acquired Gennet, which owns two IVF clinics in Prague and one in Liberec.

Andrej Babis’ chief gynecologist at Hartenberg is satisfied with the progress of the pregnancy: “FutureLife continues to expand in the field of assisted reproduction and artificial insemination. The total annual turnover of FutureLife is expected to reach 1.4 billion CZK. (£47 million).”

Much of this revenue is derived from the public health budget. The first three IVF treatment cycles are fully reimbursable under Czech state health insurance rules. The average cost is EUR 1000 per cycle. That is good business, much of it paid for out of the public health budget. In 2012, the latest year for which figures are available, FutureLife's Reprofit performed 2800 treatment cycles.

The latest version of the Czech National Register of Assisted Reproduction (NRAR), dated January 2014, lists 39 providers of assisted human reproduction in the Czech Republic, of which five are universities, one is state-owned and the rest private.

FutureLife's Reprofit (what a name, combining profit and reproduction in one!) alone is by far the largest of them, performing over 25 per cent of all treatment cycles using donated eggs in the country in 2013, according to data from the NRAR.

Six months ago, I asked how many of the smaller IVF clinics are strong enough to survive in a marketplace dominated by FutureLife (see here). I pointed out that Babis would not have invested in the business unless he thought the market was ripe for what Hartenberg calls ‘consolidation’, an investment term to describe a market full of weaker players ready to be put out of business by the strongest of them all.

Babis' entry into the IVF business is undermining the cooperation between doctors that has been common in this field of medicine in the past. One doctor (who preferred to remain anonymous) working in a Prague clinic not owned by FutureLife revealed that the exchange of experience and knowledge with doctors working in those clinics acquired by FutureLife has 'dried up'.

The new NRAR list will be appear in January 2015 (see here, in Czech & English). It will show how many of FutureLife’s competitors have miscarried nine months after FutureLife itself was conceived.