Cheongdam Learning Evolves into an Edutech Company

Stock Price Rose 73% in Last 3 Months
Performance Improvement Despite COVID-19 Impact... Growth of Online Classes
From Online Platforms to Educational Metaverse

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyungsoo Park] The corporate value of Cheongdam Learning is rapidly increasing. This is interpreted as a result of continued growth based on its own online education platform despite the impact of COVID-19. By collaborating with various artificial intelligence companies and providing high-quality online educational content, it is evolving into an edutech company.

On the 28th, in the financial investment industry, Cheongdam Learning's stock price rose 73.0% over the past three months. Considering that the KOSDAQ index rose 6.6% during the same period, the market-relative return reached 66.4 percentage points.

Cheongdam Learning is an education specialist company operating offline academies in both direct management and franchise forms, with academy business, content business, and smart class business based on smart learning. It teaches from infants to high school students through Cheongdam Language Academy, April Language Academy, and Ikarten. It holds a high brand value as a leading company in the English language academy market. The elementary reading and writing brand Page by Page is also operated in both direct management and franchise forms.

Since 2013, Cheongdam Learning has introduced its self-developed smart learning solution to offline academies. It is growing as an educational solution company by exporting digital textbooks and smart learning solutions to overseas markets such as Vietnam, China, and Japan.

Cheongdam Learning plans to launch an online-only platform and focus on increasing the number of students through it. It will collaborate with its consolidated subsidiary CMS Edu to release a convergent curriculum within the year. This is expected to broaden parents' choices. As online classes succeed, performance is also rapidly improving. In the first quarter, Cheongdam Learning recorded sales of 52.6 billion KRW and operating profit of 8.7 billion KRW, an increase of 20% and 164%, respectively, compared to the same period last year.

Jaeyoon Kim, a researcher at KTB Investment & Securities, explained, "Live classes, an online class format, succeeded due to the impact of COVID-19," and added, "They will officially launch classes within the year." He further noted, "Considering that performance growth was driven despite a decrease in offline classes, sales will rapidly increase once online classes are introduced."

Cheongdam Learning is also preparing educational metaverse products. By collaborating with a global game engine company to launch educational metaverse products within the year, it is expected to lay the foundation for becoming an edutech company. Starting with a combined 90,000 enrolled students of Cheongdam Learning and CMS Edu, it will expand to 50,000 students in Vietnam and 2.4 million students of its Chinese partner, Angrie Education.

Doohyun Kim, a researcher at Kiwoom Securities, said, "The explosive growth of Roblox, a representative virtual reality game, has increased market interest in the metaverse," and explained, "The demand for online non-face-to-face education in the post-COVID era will coincide, leading to growth of edutech companies."

According to global market research firm HolonIQ, venture capital investment in edutech reached $16.1 billion, doubling from $8.2 billion in 2018. AI-based edutech startup Riiid attracted about 200 billion KRW ($175 million) in Series D investment from SoftBank Vision Fund 2.