Dear Shareholders
FY 2011 has been a remarkable year for us. This was the year in which
we took bold new steps in innovation and created, re-created and
reformed several of our market leading products and services, yet
again. This was also the year which saw some fresh new thinking from
the government to address some of the critical challenges of the Indian
education system. Your company has been at the forefront of creating
unique innovative solutions for the Indian education market. Our
products and solutions reach out to over 16 million learners and close
to 26000 schools, making us one of the largest Education companies in
the world, in terms of customer reach. And yet, we are just getting
started. The shortages in the Indian Education landscape are so large
that the market offers an almost limitless expansion opportunity.
Your company is the only Education company worldwide which is present
across the entire Education life-cycle of our customers, the students.
Someday, we hope to create a seamless learning path for kids from 2
years to 25 years of age. Our presence in each of the Education
verticals is marked with technology-enabled products, high quality
people, structured processes and entrepreneurial leadership that come
together to deliver unmatched value to our customers. It is because of
our obsession with high quality in everything we do, that Educomp is
fast becoming a single trusted brand that defines Education.
Over the course of the year ending March 2011, our business and our
reach grew by leaps and bounds. Our multimedia content business
SmartClass grew from strength to strength and we added more than 3,400
schools to the SmartClass list of schools in a single year. This number
was more than the cumulative number of schools that we have added for
SmartClass over the last 7 years. Apart from that, we spread our K12
schools presence and are now providing infrastructure and services to
56 schools countrywide. We also received the AICTE license to launch
Engineering and PGDM programs. We became the largest company in India
for CA training, by using our breakthrough VSAT model technology. We
acquired Vidya Mandir Classes and Gateforum to become the leading Test
Prep business in India and our Online Educational ventures continued to
grow rapidly reaching close to 3 million registered users. In the
International markets, we signed an exclusive agreement with China
Distance Learning, a leading education company of China, to provide our
SmartClass content in the Chinese market in the Mandarin language.
Still our market penetration, even in our biggest businesses, is in the
low single digits in each of our businesses. There is a long runway of
opportunity ahead of us. We have built a solid Educational platform and
all we need to do now, is to continue building the business. The Indian
middle class customer is hungry for quality education and is willing to
invest a substantial amount of their income in the Education of their
children. The regulatory environment is improving. The Education Boards
like CBSE are encouraging schools to adopt multimedia content materials
for teaching in schools. The government is increasingly looking at PPP
models to address some of the critical challenges. The country is
getting enabled by digital infrastructure like high speed broadband,
wireless broadband and 3G. Clearly, the stage is set, for us to deliver
continued high growth for years and years to come.
I am delighted to share with you that even after years of undisputed
leadership in the Education sector, our innovation engine continues to
churn revolutionary products to solve key classrooms problems and add
value to the teaching experience where its most needed. Your company
has recently launched a new, improved version of SmartClass which will
raise the barriers to entry for our competition even higher. The
SmartClass Class Transformation System (or CTS) and the SmartClass
Digital Teaching System (or DTS) are the biggest and most innovative
initiatives in the space of digital classroom content and digital
classroom hardware respectively. The CTS is poised to introduce the
next generation of SmartClass in schools and is a big leap forward in
enabling excellence in schools. It will encompass any facet of
teaching- learning process and become an inseparable tool in the hands
of teachers. The DTS is the world''s first fully integrated one-switch
Digital Interactive Teaching system, designed with real classroom
challenges and Indian classroom needs in mind. Armed with the
SmartClass CTS and DTS, we plan to take this business to greater and
greater heights in the years to come.
The performance in other parts of our business has been equally
impressive. The no. of K12 schools under our reach has now grown to 56
schools making us one of the largest corporates to provide
infrastructure and management services to private schools. Our
businesses in higher education and vocational education have shown
fantastic traction growing several times over, even though those
businesses our in investment mode right now. Our ETEN students bagged
52 All India Ranks including 4 All India No. 1 Ranks in different CA
exams over the year. In the supplemental education area, our VMC
students bagged 5 of the 6 students from the Delhi Zone in Top 50 of
All India Rank List of IITJEE. 21 Gateforum students got top 10 ranks
and 141 students were among the Top 100 ranks across 7 streams of
engineering in GATE 2011. Our online business WizIQ has now reached 1.2
million users growing 20% QoQ for the last 8 quarters in a row.
We feel privileged to be able to serve millions of customers in India
through our products and services. When we acquire a customer, we think
of ways in which we can retain that customer for his/her entire
learning life. Being an Education Ecosystem company, we can easily do
that. Being present across the entire educational lifecycle gives us an
opportunity to acquire the customer once and monetize the same customer
multiple times. Our margins therefore would remain high. As we grow our
business, we have realized that the most important thing for us to
deliver is high quality. We are obsessed about quality. We look at our
customers not from the perspective of a single sale, but from the eyes
of life-long relationships. Most of our businesses have annuity style
business models and long term contracts. We work very closely with our
customers to make sure our products add value where it is most needed.
The core DNA of your company revolves around (i) Entrepreneurship (ii)
Leadership and (iii) Execution. I am grateful to have a highly
entrepreneurial leadership team who have brought the Educomp enterprise
to where it is today. Educomp reaches over 16 million students and
26,000 schools. We operate close to 800 preschools, we have enabled 56
high schools, 7 colleges, 1 higher education campus, close to 340
vocational training centres, trained over 2 million teachers, installed
SmartClass in over 6500 schools, set up 10,550 ICT labs in govt.
Schools and have close to 3 million students enrolled in our eLearning
websites. We have leadership in most of the areas that we operate in.
FY12 and the years beyond will be an exciting phase of our growth as we
move towards our vision of becoming one of the largest education
companies in the world. I am deeply thankful and grateful to our team
members, our investors, bankers, shareholders and partners who have
supported us at each stage of our evolution and believed in us.
Warm Regards
Shantanu Prakash
Managing Director
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