Yahoo Finance Byju’s Targets Tutoring Unit IPO in 2024 as Financial Woes Mount
(Bloomberg) -- Byju’s seeks to have the stock-market debut of its tutoring unit next year, later than it had previously envisaged as the Indian education-technology company struggles with financial challenges.
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The initial public offering of Aakash Educational Services is set to take place in the middle of next year, Byju’s said Monday in a statement. Byju’s had previously targeted the IPO for August-September this year, people familiar with the matter had said late last year.
An IPO of Aakash would provide Byju’s with much-needed cash. The once high-flying company led by former teacher Byju Raveendran has been trying to strike a deal with creditors to restructure a $1.2 billion loan, after the decline of the pandemic-era boom in online tutoring dealt a blow to its finances. It plans to make a quarterly interest payment of about $40 million on Monday, according to people familiar with the matter.
The three-decade-old Aakash, acquired by Byju’s for about $950 million in 2021, runs brick-and-mortar centers to help teenagers prepare for the grueling tests that rank them for entry into coveted schools such as the Indian Institute of Technology. The offline test prep leader has more than 300 centers dotting the country and has ramped up its digital test prep offerings as well.
Raveendran, a son of educators, founded his eponymous startup in 2015. The firm, whose parent company is formally known as Think & Learn Pvt, is the largest of a crop of startups that over the past decade have thrived on India’s growing mobile connections and foreign investments.
The firm has missed deadlines to file financial accounts for the year to March 31 and its offices were searched by the Indian agency that investigates violations of the nation’s foreign exchange policies.
--With assistance from Anto Antony and Reshmi Basu.
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