India's Education Ind.....a $80 bn Plus Ind....

Friends,
When I read today in ET , I was awed strucked.....I never imgained that education  sector can be as big as $80 bn , means Rs.3,60,000 cr sector if we convert it in rupees....
It means that there is ample scope for more players to get the pie......we have big players like Educom, Evveron, NIIT etc....and upcoming players like Edserve, which I also missed at 43 ....and I feel even at 200 it is looking excellent pick.....
But I have already mentioned in my recent post about First Object Technology which is in education space....and I remember that in one of my reply I mentioned about DMC Int.
Keep a watch on DMC Int , read all annoucement at bse on DMC Int and if found good one can have exposer there.....
Dow tanked today by over 300 points and hence we will also open with a big gap down.We may see more downside after that as well.But buy stocks which are fundamentally sound in staggered manner , buy more on dips........

Well, I may prove wrong on market direction and market may dip more then I expect and hence I leave it to my readers what they wants to do.........I have proved wrong in 2008 and I may again prove wrong in 2010.........I donno exactly what can be the consequences of European financial crisis..........where the world economies and market will react and how much time it will take to stabilze the market......
I will only write here , that I am staying invested....as I did in whole 2008 year......

Rajeev




PE players line up for a share of education pie



PE/VC Firms Pump In $140 M So Far This Year, 50% More Than In Entire ’09
Dibyajyoti Chatterjee MUMBAI.
EDUCATION has emerged one of the most profitable businesses in India, making private equity investors enroll in big numbers to the $80-billion plus industry, anywhere from pre-schools to B-schools.
Numbers crunched by education-focussed private equity fund, Kaizen Management Advisors, show that venture capitalists and private equity players have pumped in excess of $140 million so far this year, 50% more than what they invested in the whole of 2009, as their search for value investment opportunities takes many funds to the hotbed of Indian education.
“We feel the education sector offers tremendous growth potential and is poised for rapid growth in the next few years,” says Ramesh Venkat, chief executive of Reliance Equity Advisors, a private equity arm of Reliance Capital, which entered the segment a few months ago by investing about Rs 100 crore in Pathways World School, a primary and higher secondary school.
The total VC/PE investment in the sector is likely to be around $300 million this year, says Sandeep Aneja, MD of Kaizen Management Advisors. Dhanraj Bhagat, partner at research firm Grant Thornton, says investments in education sector will grow 40-50% every year. There are about 25 PE/VC players in the market actively looking for good deals, and around10 deals have been done in the past few months.
Last week US-based VC firm Foundation Capital made two back-to-back investments: Rs 31 crore in Tree House Education, a company that operates in the pre-school and K-12 category; and Rs 20 crore in Aspire Human Capital Management, a Gurgaon-based employability enhancing firm. “We are interested in investing in large markets which have scale,” says Ashu Garg, partner, Foundation Capital. “It is estimated that about 70 million young Indians suffer from employability skill mismatch,” he adds.
Lack of regulation in K-12, or kindergarten to class XII, segment and supplementary education has made education attractive for investors. Matrix Partners India, too has invested Rs 59 crore in Tree House in two tranches; Rs 50 crore in 2008 and Rs 9 crore this month. Rajesh Bhatia, chairman and managing director of Tree House Education, declined to reveal the stake of PE firms, but said the promoters have more than a 51% stake in the company.
Tree House runs 135 preschools across the country and has expanded in the K-12 segment in the past 18 months. It runs the schools under management contract. The pre-school segment is worth $2 billion but is growing at an annual rate of 40-45%, according to Rishi Navani, co-founder and managing director of Matrix Partners.
Matrix Partners last year invested Rs 100 crore in FIITJEE, a coaching institute focused on training for IIT entrance exam. The engineering coaching business market is worth Rs 10,000 crore, said Mr Navani. The education sector began heating up in 2005.