A post by Zerodha co-founder Nithin Kamath is striking a chord with investors for raising a simple but uncomfortable question: Why are businesses that deal with money often valued more richly than those that do life-saving work?
Kamath, one of India’s most-followed voices in investing and the co-founder of Zerodha, India’s largest stock brokerage, said this thought stayed with him after he recently met Dr Devi Shetty, founder of Narayana Hospitals.
What troubled him was the comparison itself. Narayana Hospitals, which operates around 18,000 beds across India and is widely known for making complex surgeries more affordable, has a market capitalisation of roughly ₹38,000 crore. Yet many financial services businesses in India — including brokerages — are valued more highly.
“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,” he said in a post on X.
He further mentioned, “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.”
Why the discrepancy in valuations?
Kamath said he understands that markets have their own logic. Analysts and fund managers can justify such valuation gaps through familiar arguments around margins, capex, scalability, and asset-light versus asset-heavy business models.
Still, he said the contrast felt strange.
“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.
At the heart of Kamath’s post is a broader discomfort with what the market tends to reward. Businesses that are closest to money often get premium valuations, while companies doing difficult, infrastructure-heavy and socially essential work are often priced like low-growth utilities.
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