WHEN EDUCATION BOOMERANGS

Education is universally accepted as the means to progress, improved living conditions and better culture. It begets knowledge, skills, better behaviour and social upliftment. 

Any proper investment done in education has always yielded good returns. Can anyone think of the planet without educational infrastructure and services? 

Progress in technology brought about a virtual world where people could meet and communicate without moving. Online delivered content almost as if being offline. Covid 19 and the closure of the world consolidated the online presence, particularly in education. In fact being online helped to ensure that no one lost out their educational years during the pandemic. 

Byju’s (the company is officially known as Think and Learn Private Limited) was in existence even before Covid 19. Byju Ravindran, the promoter, has been an excellent tuition master when it came to entrance coaching for professional courses. He has cashed this reputation to scale up his venture with assistance from technology and that was the formation of Byju’s, the online educational platform. 

Due to his reputation as an excellent entrance coach, Byju was always in news. The success of Khan’s Academy, a pioneer in online classes, motivated venture funds to invest heavily in Byju’s. With such funding, Byju, in his round T shirt & Jeans ( a la Zackerburg), became a poster boy in Indian Start-up scene. 

With the large mass of K12 student in India, the funders thought that Byju’s would succeed. The company recruited from IITs and IIMs and formed a huge workforce, both in content production and marketing. Venture funds received were burned in  marketing blitzkriegs including sponsoring Indian cricket teams for years. Leading actors became Byju’s brand ambassadors. Covid was a blessing in disguise for the company where online education boomed and the pundits predicted the online makeover of education from offline. In all, Byju’s got funded to the tune of USD 8 Billion! The company went into a dizzying market cap of USD 25 Billion. 

Alas, Byju’s aggressive and unethical marketing strategies bombed. It ended up with huge litigations from customers across India. It could never reach its revenue targets. Scandels emerged. To compensate that, the company went into acquiring spree and ended up in buying about 20 companies in online & offline education space. Even that did not help the company improve its revenue expectations. Most of its investments went into black hole. Challenges with its auditing firm came out. Funders started blaming Byju and went after him personally. Good talent jumped out of the company and others got sacked. The protagonist wasn’t seen being in India lately. 

The news appeared on 14/01/24, shows Byju’s market cap being brought down to USD 1 billion by BlackRock. It is really not the end of the news. We could be hearing about Byju’s more, but not positively. It looks as if even a miracle may not be able to save Byju’s. At best, it could end up as a case study in B. Schools.