Pearson Plc Stakes an Educational Claim in India
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| John Makinson, chairman of Pearson India and the Pearson Plc board member | |
What about other Pearson group companies? Will they also establish a presence here?
I believe that the Pearson group companies that need to be in India already are here. We have under the Financial Times a company called Interactive Data Corporation which is a quoted company in America — that doesn’t have a significant presence in India. I guess that in five years time, it would. In three years time I guess our index business, FTSE financial index business, will probably have a reasonable presence in India. So yes, there are businesses that will enter the Indian market in time, but the big Pearson companies are already here. We are pretty much all here.
You have just invested $30 million in India. Going forward how do you see your India investments growing?
We don’t have a dedicated pool for India. And it’s primarily because we don’t have particular capital constraints. It won’t surprise me if we invest a $100 million in India every five years. But that’s not a plan. That’s just a possibility.
You are trying your hand at vocational training in India. How did you size up that opportunity?
We are better known as a curriculum based educational publishing business. But we do have a very substantial vocational training business in America and we already do a lot of vocational assessment work in India — so we do tests for nurses and cabin staff for airlines. And we do a lot of professional vocational training in America. We are the biggest teacher of English as a foreign language around the world. We are also in the technology training and publishing business in America. So we have English-teaching capabilities and domain skills like knowledge of construction or plumbing. We have content that addresses all of these areas and in some cases, we have testing and assessment capabilities as well. What we didn’t have was mass market penetration in India and an understanding of the bottom of the pyramid economics. And that’s what Educomp has through their success in developing the ICT [Information and communication technologies] business in schools.
In vocational training, you are focusing on the blue-collar worker space. Is this an attempt to start at the bottom and gradually move up the income pyramid, so to say? Is that your strategy for India?
Yes. We certainly need to address the bottom of the pyramid. We need to think about physical distribution, about skills training, delivery of testing, accreditation in blue collar skills training. We do have something of a presence through the BTEC [a vocational qualification in the UK] qualification in the professional market — accountants, security analysts and so on. But the initial focus of this venture will be quite blue collar and the bottom of the pyramid but we gradually see it going up.
But the blue collar worker space in developing markets like India is very different from developed markets where you have expertise. Doesn’t that create issues of transferability?
Yes. That’s why we are working with a partner. We did a lot of very detailed work with Educomp on this issue. But yes, it is not readily transferable. We spent a lot of time with C.K. Prahalad, who is on our board, on thinking about those kinds of transferability issues. So I don’t think we are that naïve about this.
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