BYJUS from a darling of investors to a loss making laggard
Education is considered to be a noble profession and a teacher is given a lot of respect.
A good teacher can not only help in making a student proficient in a subject but also shape a students personality.
However good teachers are rare and thus students have to take the help of a tutor.
Thus the tuition market is booming.
Perhaps it was this opportunity the BYJU’s wanted to cash in.
Equipped with some fancy teaching tools and packages it wanted to enter India's thriving tuition business.
Back in the year 2011 BYJU's was a startup that caught the imagination of a lot of investors.
Its rise was meteoric.
Parents trusted it as the trusted tuition provider for their kids and investors believed it was in a sector which had the potential to do extremely well based on the fact that India has an enormous student population.
Everything was going well for BYJU's and it was expanding its business at an enormous pace and yet things started going bad for this start up which was nothing short of having a dream run.
What went wrong with BYJU's
They were too aggressive in their marketing. The company faced flak for being involved in using unethical marketing techniques in order to attract its customers.
They started forcing their teachers to promote their courses by peddling them as special and
beneficial offerings for the students.
The teachers went about like broken records promoting these so-called exclusive packages to one and all.
What is exclusive about a package that is being sold to everyone. Nothing and soon people realized as to what was being dished out to them.
They would show the student in poor light
Another bad practice they would indulge in is they would tell the parents that their child is doing poorly in studies and BYJU's can help them do better.
Soon the news of the bad practices started getting them bad reviews. As a result people started avoiding their services.
They started mass layoffs to cut losses. Today as we stand the company does not even have the money to pay the salary to its employees.
As per a report BYJU is currently focusing on the Test preparation market which is huge in India.
For the year 2020 to 2025 the revenue can be expected to grow at a handsome CAGR growth rate of 9.3%
This is supposed to be in the backdrop that the online test prep market is likely to grow at a CAGR growth of 42.3%
Despite being in this segment its bad reputation is pulling it down.
Over the years BYJU’s expanded into a global EduTech company that grew into having its footprints in 120 countries and an enrolment of 150 million learners.
Yet its ill repute and bad business practices has caused its business to shrink.
Would it be able to recover? Well that is a question which only time can answer however
So far it looks like a bad failure for a business which started with a dream run.
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