Educomp to enter IIT, engineering preparatory coaching

Educomp Solutions, the Gurgaon-based education content and service provider, is looking at opening engineering preparatory programme centres in a bid to ramp up its supplemental education business.

The company is eyeing 75 Leap centres in the next financial year, located in cities including Guwahati, Jalandhar, Amritsar, Varanasi, Allahabad, Meerut, Patna, Surat, Jammu, Patiala, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Agra, Gurgaon, Sonipat and Ludhiana.

Educomp recently restructured its business to create a new entity for its supplemental education segment, which includes off-school services such as tutoring, counselling and assessment. It appointed Ernst & Young for the restructuring exercise.

Industry sources have pegged the IIT-JEE and AIEEE coaching market size at Rs 2,500 crore with an average coaching spend of each student being close to Rs 30,000-50,000 annually. Educomp is looking to offer its services at discounted rates over the prevailing market price to garner volumes.

It will use VSAT technology to deliver standardised and cost-effective test preps, and also leverage smart class and smart assessment system for coaching.

“We are consolidating our presence in the supplemental education space, which is currently among the fastest growing segment, with an estimated market size of $8 billion (Rs 36,400 crore) in India alone,” Shantanu Prakash, chief executive, Educomp, said.

The education firm is looking to open test centres in 200 cities across India by 2012. It also plans to roll out other test prep products such as medicine and BBA from 2011.

“We want to attain market leadership in coaching business, it is difficult to put a timeline on it, but that is our target,” Prakash told DNA.