(L)earning app

BYJU'S is India's largest ed-tech company and the creator of India's most loved school
learning app. Launched in 2015, BYJU'S offers highly personalised and effective learning
programs for classes 1 - 12 (K-12), and aspirants of competitive exams like JEE, IAS etc.
With 50 million registered students and 3.5 million paid subscriptions, BYJU'S has become
one of the most preferred education platforms across the globe.
Byjus aims to be profitable by the end of 2023 and the company has set itself an ambitious
revenue target of $2 billion for F2022-2023 and will consolidate all its K10 India subsidiaries
into one unit to leverage their synergies.
Byjus has been battling multiple issues, including a truncated fund raising, regulatory
pressure and a much-delayed filing of audited financial statements that disclosed a 13-fold
jump in losses for the year ended March 2021.
Byju’s is seeking to restructure its $1.2 billion loan as it struggles with steep losses and cost
reduction targets, among this the company is in talks with advisers for a $1 billion initial
public offering of its tutoring business Aakash Educational Services, to bolster its balance
sheet. Aakash’s annual revenue is set to double in the current year ending in March 2023.
Byju’s is also in talks with Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth funds and current investors to raise
$500-600 million. Byju's previously turned to wholly-owned Aakash for an unsecured Rs 300
crore loan for 'principal business activities. Think & Learn Pt.
To achieve the plan on becoming profitable by 2023, Byjus is also planning to lower
marketing and sales costs, Byju’s would also lay off 2,500 employees over the next six
months to reduce redundancies.
Amongst all these chaos and recent downtrend of byjus still there is no change in Byju’s
valuation. The new fundraising process is still going on. In its last round of funding,
announced last week, Byju's had raised $250 million (about Rs 2,000 crore) from its existing
investors, including Qatar Investment Authority.
The funding kept Byju’s valuation at $22 billion and its status as India’s most valuable start-
up, but analysts claims that their validation is far lesser but byjus uses its old valuation to
raise money.

The company is already facing a tougher business climate. In addition to this, more
complaints have emerged about its work culture and business model. The company is accused
of providing non friendly working conditions for its employees. Numerous current and ex-
employees have mentioned harsh working conditions with excessive hours, incidents of
physical and verbal abuse, and a culture in which they are encouraged to mislead clients to
make sales by almost any means. WhatsApp messages, internal emails, company contracts
and audio recordings of calls and meetings reveal how some managers and bosses are
harassing their juniors to work for 72+ hours and restrict them to leave the office unless
targets are met. The salesmen are also forced to always pay a certain amount every year to
keep their jobs ‘secured’ in the company.

To cut down their marketing costs Byju’s also wants to exit their sponsorship with BCCI. The
agreement with the Board was until November 2023, but now will be continued till March
2023. Future on their weird marketing strategies the company also received criticism for
signing Lionel Messi as its international brand ambassador just after laying off 2500 people
from the company, Divya Gokul Nath, co-founder and director, stated that the company
would be establishing new alliances and employing 10,000 teachers for both Indian and
international businesses to increase brand awareness abroad. This is not all the problems it
faces as the future has new entrants in the Ed tech learning platform as
YouTube announced that it will allow qualified creators in India to provide free and paid
courses to consumers starting next year, Byju’s will face new competition that has access to a
bigger audience without doubt. Creators will also be able to provide viewers with
supplemental materials such as documents, images, and PDFs via the YouTube app, thus
making the e-learning concept flow around the country with ease.

Amongst the internal conflict byjus has also been called to court for the case of Rajesh
Kumar, a middle-class, low-income earner, was forced to buy Byju’s subscription by two
salesmen who ‘stated’ that his 11-year-old daughter was ‘academically weak’ after quizzing
her for two hours, thus pressuring him to buy the course. 'Your daughter will end up poor like
you' and 'You should be ashamed for trying to stop her from succeeding in life'," the 41-year-
old said at his workplace in the city of Faridabad, located on the outskirts of Delhi. One of the
salesmen took Mr. Kumar’s phone and signed up for a loan without taking any consent which
he started receiving reminder text messages from a third-party finance firm about an
upcoming monthly instalment. Kumar said he thought he was only signing up for Byju's
course, not a loan.
NCPCR i.e., National Commission for Protection of Child Rights issued a summons in
December to BYJU’s CEO after media reports that alleged that the ed-tech company is
exploiting students by hard selling and mis-selling its courses. The reports said that the
company had been “actively tricking” customers to enter into loan-based agreements for
courses which refund may not be available. The company was asked to reform their refund
policies. Against all allegations, Byju’s denies any mis-selling of courses to any of its
customers. Byjus not will not be sending its sales executives to potential customers' homes to
pitch their courses to avoid miss selling and their sales would also be It further claimed that
its sales would now be triple-checked, byjus also stated that it has a stated goal of expanding
EFA to at least 1 crore children by 2025.

TASK AT HAND
You’re the CEO of Byjus, come with the plans and structure to all of Byju’s K10 India
subsidiaries into one unit to leverage their synergies, to attain profitability.

DELIVERABLES
 Plans to combine all K10 subsidiaries into one unit
 Revising the refund policy and affordability test of courses
 Plans to compete against future competitor YouTube and plans to gain a competitive
edge over them
 Phase wise implementation of the new remote selling strategy and future plans for
new strategies to increase sales
 Future Revenue projections and plan after synergizing all K10 subsidiaries into one
unit
 Complete debt restructure of all loans
 Prospectus for the future IPO of askash
 Future Revenue projections and plan after synergizing all K10 subsidiaries into one
unit
 IPO plan (lot size etc)
 Provide the current valuation of Byjus and Akash by providing sufficient information
to back up the valuation
 New marketing strategies to cut costs and addressing the backlash in the Messi
sponsorship
 STP analysis
 Plans to reduce marketing and sales cost
 Future plans for organization structure and increasing the workforce (new teachers)
 Addressing the issues faced by employees and to come up with a better working
environment and organizing structure
 Draft a press release addressing the resent allegations of hard selling courses and
forcing parents into loan schemes