As soon as Corona crises took the world to stand still,
shutting down the businesses, markets, railways and metros, jeopardizing the
livelihood of millions of people across the world, some sectors witnessed
unexpected growth in 2020.
In such gloomy times, a few businesses mushroomed over the
night to make the lives of people a bit easier, which had the upper hand in the
technology.
Lockdown of Educational Institutions
E-learning is among those few industries that witnessed
exponential growth during Coronavirus Pandemic not only in India but across the
world as the lockdown took the world into its grip since the beginning of
February 2020.
The closure of educational intuitions led the second-largest
e-learning industry in India towards exponential growth, paving the way to
revolutionize the e-Learning sector.
The sectors that come under the e-Learning industry are:
Primary Education
Secondary Education
Professional
Skilling Courses
The factors responsible for explosive growth in the
e-Learning industry in India were:
Closure of
educational institutions (school and colleges)
Closure of coaching
and training institutions
Penetration of
Smartphones across urban and rural areas
Easy accessibility
of internet across urban and rural swaths of the country
700 million
internet users in the country
Affordable
internet/data service
National Education
Policy sparks momentum to the digitization of the education system
Potential of e-Learning Industry in India
• Total market
size of $735 million
• 4,530 active
Ed-Tech start-ups in India
• 435
start-ups founded in the last 24-months
• 120 per cent
expected growth in FY 2020
• Expected to
reach $1.7 billion by the end of the year 2020
• It is
expected to grow 8 to 10 times in the next 5 years owing to the repercussion of
the pandemic
Investments and Acquisitions in 2020
The sector has seen a massive influx of investments along
with big acquisitions and mergers in 2020. Some of them are as under:
Investments
Following ed-tech giants and startups got massive rounds of
funding in Corona period
BYJU’s Received
$500-million funding from Silver Lake in September 2020.
BYJU’s Raised
funding from investors like BlackRock, Sands Capital and Alkeon Capital in
September 2020.
BYJU raised $120
billion from Israeli-Russian millionaire Yuri Milner’s DST Global in August
2020.
Unacademy raised
$150 million from Facebook and General Atlantic in February 2020.
Acquisitions
Following were the major acquisitions in the e-Learning
industry in India in 2020
BYJU’s acquired
White Hat Jr. for $300 million in August 2020 to spread its legs in coding
education.
BYJU’s acquired
LabInApp in September 2020 which offers science lab simulation experience on
mobile devices.
Embibe bought
multi-lingual test preparation platform OnlineTyari in February 2020.
Unacademy acquired
Kreatryx (Online and offline GATE and IES Preparation) in March 2020.
Unacademy acquired
coding platform Codechef in June 2020.
Unacademy acquired
PrepLadder (Post-graduate medical entrance exam preparation platform) in July
2020.
With the splendid growth, the e-Learning sector has witnessed
since the outset of the pandemic, the predicted growth of rate 8-9 times in the
next 5 years does not seem impossible anymore.
