Having a strong influence in India is a huge asset, and we can further develop it by working together.
Bangalore: India’s most valuable start-up company Byju has acquired Great Learning, a Singapore-based company that provides education and training. Think about 600 million dollars. Cash This acquisition marks a breakthrough in professional education and training in India and globally, with a total investment of US$1 billion to expand its services beyond K12 and subdivision exam preparation. This market segment is in the millions.
A week ago, Byju raised US$500 million to acquire Epic, an online reading platform for children in the United States. The platform was promoted by the recent US$1.5 billion fundraising campaign by UBS, Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund ADQ and Blackstone Group LP. Among other things. In April, he also signed one of the largest educational technology acquisition agreements, acquiring Aakash Educational Services Ltd for US$950 million. In an interview, founder and CEO Bew Ravendran talked about Byju’s acquisition strategy, growth prospects and business areas.
The industry will undergo positive changes in the next few years. Higher education develops slowly and safely on the Internet at very little cost, and the opportunities are huge. After meeting with Mohan (Mohan Lakhamraju, founder and CEO of Great Learning), they realized that they had created something special and that it had grown exponentially in the past few years. This is in line with our latest integration (acquisition) and fully in line with our mission to help students learn. They grew up before the pandemic, but now a new way of thinking has emerged. People study and work at home. The pandemic, which took many years to complete, has accelerated.
How will Byju expand in this new field?
If we make such a large-scale investment and enter a new market segment, it does not seem to be an experiment, we always look at the long-term, what we can do with it, you will see that we are making a lot of investment in this area to accelerate it Growth. We have invested 1 billion U.S. dollars in this field and will invest another 400 million U.S. dollars on this transaction in the short term.
Great Learning’s user base has grown 15 times in the past 16 months. How can you speed it up?
In India, we will go deep into smaller towns. Having a strong influence in India is a huge asset, and we can further develop it by working together. Then there are overseas markets such as North America and other English-speaking regions. Everyone is learning about Latin America, where the market reaction has been strong. Byju’s strategy is to invest to provide more courses on the platform.
What are the growth prospects for 2021?
We expect our core business-education-to achieve significant organic growth. We are now mainly focusing on three parts: K12, exam preparation and higher education. We assume that all three industries will show steady growth. Acquisition is easy, but through integration with our partners (acquired companies), we have improved our management capabilities and the mentality of the founders. All acquisitions are complementary and in line with Byju’s long-term goals. In India, growth will continue, but it will take 34 years; we expect the sales distribution between India and the world market to be 6,040 vehicles.
