Planning to add 150 centres this fiscal: Aptech

With the recent launch of their BFSI academy and partnership with Lakme, Aptech is looking to expand this fiscal year by adding 150 more centers up to March, 2016, says Ninad Karpe, CEO & MD of the company.At present the company has roughly 800 franchises in India and 200 abroad. In an interview with CNBCTV-18, Karpe said that he is “looking forward to a lot more with the Government schemes”. Aptech has been a part of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY).Below is the verbatim transcript of Ninad Karpe’s interview with Mangalam Maloo & Reema Tendulkar.Reema: What updates can you offers us on government orders through the national skill mission what new scheme are you working on? A: We are National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) partners. We have been there for last two or three years. The new scheme is Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) scheme. Under the NSDC scheme we are doing as a partner we are doing some limited amount of trainings. We had done last time and this year as well. We are looking forward to participate in future as well with PMKVY. Yes, we have had some bit of traction and we are looking forward to lot more.   Mangalam: You also had a tie-up with Flipkart so what is the update on that and you also launched a Banking, Financial services and Insurance (BFSI) institute so could you give us a sense of how that development is coming along?A: E-commerce as an industry is obviously booming a lot. Lot of businesses happening and naturally any such business requires training. With Flipkart, we are fundamentally training them to ensure that 100-1,000 more of their re-sellers are on onboarded. So, this training is fundamentally to ensure that people who are registered with them get proper training to onboard their on to Flipkart platform. Similar training we will do with other e-commerce companies as well. It is clearly an area of focus for us.  In terms of BFSI segment, we have launched certificate courses on banking. We have initially launched around 18 or 20 centers in Delhi. So, we are piloting it in Delhi and these courses are launched. We are very optimistic of this vertical and this year we are going to focus on Delhi and surrounding area and then roll it all across India. Reema: Let us focus on the individual training segment. That is a significant portion of your revenues what is the outlook over there?A: We are always doing new things so one of the new initiative we have done is we have tied to with Lakme to roll out training courses for their beauty and hair styling and all that which can then get absorbed in the beauty industry. We will start with one centre now and our intention is to open it at least 100 centers in next three to four years. So, that is another new initiative. On individual training segment there are two parts of it one is India and one is outside India.In India, we are now slowly expanding into the non-tech industry as well. We have been traditional strong in computers and then in multimedia animation, hardware and networking but now we are moving on to beauty, moving on to banking and finance as well as aviation.  So, we want to be a preferred place for all these kind of occasional courses. Outside India we are there in 40 countries and we will continue to expand in many more emerging countries. Our focus is on emerging countries.Mangalam: But the enterprise training segment now that is where the company differs from NIIT as well because NIIT has majority of its revenues coming in from the enterprise segment but though it is a minority, how is that coming along? What is the outlook in your enterprise business?A: The enterprise training, there are two parts of it, one part is the testing part which is roughly 70-80 percent of our business. We have had a good year, a year before when we did training for CMAT. Last year was not as good. But overall the testing industry is expected to grow at least 35 percent and we will see that kind of growth. We have been a large player in the segment for almost last eight years. Last year we did close to 1.5 million plus tests. So, in that enterprise business, 80 percent is on testing, so testing business, we are very optimistic. Balance 20 percent is on training solution out of which we are again optimistic on business coming to us from the e-commerce segment. So, there are growth drivers in both these segments.Reema: What is the total number of franchisees that the company has currently and how much are you expected to add in the future?A: Overall, as a company, across all the segment put to get, we have roughly close to 800 franchise centres and roughly 200 outside of India excluding China, so in 40 countries. We are looking at expanding in this financial year, around 150 centres up to March. By the end of September, we have added roughly around 62 or 64 odd centres across various brands.So, we are very much on target in terms of adding a total of 150 centres in this year. Mangalam: Recently, your competitors also launched a digital platform, niit.tv, what are your company’s plans for the digital platform considering that is likely to be a major growth driver as well?A: We already have a platform called Onlinevarsity which is available to our students. We have more than 700 videos, more than 2,00,000 odd books have been downloaded. After April 1st, 2014, all our books are on the digital platform. That was available to students. From that we expanded to non-students as well on the same platform shop.onlinevarsity where there are free courses available and of course, if you want premium courses, there are paid courses.On the consumption side, we have moved from physical books to digital books. On courses availability, the market is moving slow, but we are already ahead of the market in terms of availability of courses in the Indian market on some of these platforms. So, yes, we are very optimistic about digital, we have started way early, two years back and revenue flows will start soon because of the simple fact that we have changed physical books to digital. It has had a lot of improvement in terms of cost, in terms of availability, but the next option of making online courses available to non-students also we have started. So, this has been played out. It might take some time to get some robust revenues, but we want to be in the forefront.