Having already established its reputation as India’s sole full-service company for the K-12 schools sector, Educomp Solutions Ltd (ESL) has devised an intelligent and prudent market diversification strategy. Given the relatively low labour and research costs of the company, marketing ESL’s products and services abroad offers the advantages of testing them against the sophisticated information technology driven education products in Western and Asia Pacific markets, and the opportunity to reverse engineer and adapt them for the Indian marketplace in the company’s highly advanced, 400-strong R&D lab in Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi. During 2007-08 the company’s top management went into over-drive to plant the company’s flag in several countries abroad.
* On June 7, 2007 ESL purchased Ask ‘n’ Learn, an education technology company based in Singapore, through its wholly-owned subsidiary Educomp Asia Pte Ltd for Rs.16.1 crore. Ask ‘n’ Learn has a clients base comprising 140 educational institutions overseas and 120 schools in Singapore. According to company sources, this acquisition has enabled ESL to establish a beachhead in nine Asia Pacific countries including Indonesia, Brunei and Vietnam.
* On September 19, 2007 ESL acquired a 70 percent equity stake “on a fully diluted basis” in Savvica Inc, a company based in Canada and described as a leading e-learning provider focused on next generation web-based learning management systems for education communities. Together Savvica and ESL have developed Learnhub, “a set of tools that make online learning fun and engaging, and online teaching easy and effective”.
* Through its subsidiary Educomp Asia Pacific Pte Ltd, the company has acquired a 51 percent equity stake in Learning.com, a US-based company providing web-enabled curriculums and e-learning solutions.
* Last fiscal ESL negotiated a “significant partnership” with the Singapore-based Raffles Education Corp (REC) which inter alia runs Raffles Institution, a 185-year-old K-12 school in the island republic. Under an agreement signed with REC, the first Raffles School outside Singapore will be jointly promoted in India, and ESL will introduce several REC professional education programmes (business English, MBA, fashion design and hospitality) at the collegiate level in the next academic year. Moreover the two companies will jointly market ESL’s products and services in the People’s Republic of China.