Aptech Computer Education Dharamshala

Aptech looks to Russia, Vietnam for growth
NEW DELHI: IT training and learning solutions provider Aptech will focus more on emerging markets such as Vietnam, Russia and countries in the Middle East and Africa to boost its growth, chief executive and managing director Ninad Karpe told ET in an interview. Aptech said it plans to add 150 franchise centres in India and abroad in the next 12 months. "W

e are focusing on becoming a global career education company. We are following a multi-product , multi-geography strategy. These emerging markets are interesting — they are not very easy to enter, but they provide fairly longterm prospects," said Mr Karpe. "The early signs of this year show a far better upward market trend in enrollment , with a lot of enrollments happening in June-July . Overall, the market scenario seems to be far better than last year for career enrollments," he said. Aptech, which earns around one-third of its retail revenue from outside India, mainly from some 35 emerging markets, has also started offering animation and English language training, besides IT training , the MD said. "After the acquisition of animation firm MAAC for Rs 76 crore, the revenue from animation education is far greater than from IT education. There is a big demand for multimedia from web designing and ad agencies," said Mr Karpe. Aptech which provides training to some 4,42,326 students across the world will have a different strategy for its brands such as Aptech computer education and Arena, which provides animation training and new brands such as englishexpress and Avalon, which deals with travel and tourism. "This does not mean we are taking focus off the Indian market. With the matured brands, we are certainly getting into class C and class D cities. What is happening is, a lot of students don't want to travel to big cities, they want education in their home towns. The new brands we are targeting for the big cities," said Mr Karpe. The training firm said the entry into the school segment is not on the cards as its diversification into ICT (information and communication technology) projects, had not turned out to be a good experience. "We did try a bit of diversification, we did some government projects such as Delhi school project and we incurred some losses there. We have now decided to focus mostly on career education, after that the world is open for us," Mr Karpe added.