Aptech banking on two-brand strategy

MUMBAI, INDIA: Aptech Limited, India's oldest IT education and training company, has come a long way to become a trusted name in the IT education sector and established its presence across five continents. With its acquisition of MAAC (Maya Academy of Advanced Cinematics) recently, Aptech today controls around 60 per cent of the organized IT education market in India.

Ninand Karpe, Aptech Limited's managing director and CEO, talks to CIOL about the MAAC acquisition and its role in company's overall business, strategy of continuing with two brands, tie-up with United Nations Information Center (UNIC) and its benefits to students, along with new business plans for future.

How will the MAAC acquisition influence Aptech's business both in India and overseas?

Ninand Karpe: MAAC became a part of Aptech family in April 2010, so it has been more than a year now. MAAC was the second largest brand in terms of revenue and networks, while Arena topped the list in animation. Now between the two brands, we have got almost 60 per cent market share of the organized market in India, but overseas market sounds to be a different story.

However, we will continue with both the brands and two-brand strategy. At the back-end, everything will be integrated — HR, Finance and all support functions, but still they will function as two separate companies.

Arena is spread across 15 countries, while MAAC is still very much Indian. With our experience in 40 countries, we see a lot of opportunities to take MAAC outside India and expand it within the country and I also think it is a valuable addition to the Aptech family.

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Recently, United Nations Information Center (UNIC) announced a tie-up with Aptech. So can you throw some light on this tie-up?

Karpe: United Nations tied up with Aptech recently. We have our annual film festival for animation films called 24fps (frames per second) — it is a leading film festival where people exhibit short animation movies from across the world.

So this time, the UNIC has come out with its eight millennium development goals, which include elimination of poverty. The tie-up with United Nations encourages students to make animation films around those development goals.

The films will be showcased across the United Nations and once successful, they will be screened around the world. So hopefully this will give a greater visibility to animation students.

There is no revenue back and forth; and I think this is beyond revenues. It is getting the industry's leading film festival like 24fps and a recognition from the UN.

And this tie-up gives the UN the opportunity to pick up good films around the eight millennium development goals and allows our students to showcase their talent to United Nations.

Could you brief on the company's revenue and business strategy?

Karpe: I will talk about revenues excluding China as it is a separate joint venture. The revenues at this point of time outside India is 34-35 per cent and our intention is to increase it to 50 per cent by 2015.

Our whole strategy is called length, depth and breadth, which is all about widening our presence in the countries with a population over a million, increasing the number of centers and choosing the places where we want to put more products, respectively.

Aptech is not just an IT training company but is a career education company too. We have got IT training, hardware and networking training, multimedia and animation training, aviation, travel, tourism and hospitality trainings. But animation and IT training form the most significant part.

With MAAC's acquisition, do you have any major plans to expand the centers and take it to new geographies?

Karpe: We are yet to finalize opening of a MAAC center outside India. In India, MAAC has around 180 centers and I think there is a scope to increase that by at least 20 in two years.

We are planning to take MAAC to Philippines because its product differentiation is slightly more advanced in animation and it is not much on the multimedia side. And Philippines has got a very matured animation industry with lot of big studios. Setting up a center there will help us grow in the domestic industry. Also, MAAC is dedicated to higher level of creativity and animation.

Apart from the IT education segment, what are your plans on the online testing centers in India?

Karpe: We have an enterprise business group, which contributes around 25 per cent of our business. It has two parts — corporate training and online testing. In the last financial year, we conducted close to 1.2 million tests and these were done for educational institutions for their semester exams and for some corporates. We hope to do nearly 1.6 million tests this year in 70 of our centers across India.