Affected by the epidemic, offline education pressed the “pause button”, and many online education companies such as Chalk.com, Good Future, New Oriental Online, and Ape Coaching have won the favor of many users.
Editor’s note: This article comes from “ “Finance” “, author: Xu Yang walk back and forth
“In the Spring Festival of 2020, the employees who just won the year-end awards thought that they could have a good year, but the epidemic broke out and caught everyone off guard.” Yuan Dong, vice president of Chalknet said. On January 20, the news that “new crown pneumonia can be passed from person to person” came out on this day, and the CEO of Chalknet Zhang Xiaolong made the decision to “stop all offline tutoring classes and sprint online education”.
Chalknet, which specializes in civil service exam training, is an online and offline vocational education institution. It has offline branches in more than 30 cities across the country. Yuan Dong introduced that the impact of the epidemic on offline business was “fatal” and almost stopped; but because of “demand still exists”, the company’s online business increased by 200% year-on-year, and the proportion of offline to online users reached More than 80%.
Affected by the epidemic, on January 23, the Education Department of Hubei Province announced the extension of the start of the spring semester of elementary and secondary schools, and then several universities in Hubei Province announced the delay of the school. On January 27, the Ministry of Education also issued a notice to delay the start of the spring semester of 2020. After that, the relevant person in charge of the Ministry of Education further requested that doing a good job in the prevention and control of the new crown pneumonia epidemic is the current priority task. Off-campus training institutions must stop offline training activities in accordance with local requirements, and must not start classes in advance to form student clusters to prevent epidemic spread.
After offline training was “snapped with the pause button”, the chalk net of “walking on two legs” is undoubtedly lucky. On February 6, the offline educational institution “Brothers”, which had been listed on the New Third Board and was once valued at over 1 billion yuan, announced its closure. Founder Li Chao said in a “letter to all the students, employees, and shareholders of Brother Brothers”: “Because of the company’s cash flow problems, the Beijing campus will stop enrolling, and all employees will be demobilized.”
” A Letter to Brothers, All Students, Employees, and Shareholders “published by Li Chao
At the same time, online education is back on the air. In addition to the chalk network, many future online education companies such as Good Future, New Oriental Online, and Ape Coaching, have ushered in a “double harvest” of “user volume and stock prices. In fact, just over a month ago, online education was still in the predicament of “layoffs”, “salary cuts”, “capital winter” and so on.
Does the epidemic really allow online education companies to “counterattack”? Behind the development spring, are there any hidden concerns in the online education industry?
The epidemic helps solve the problem of “acquiring customers”
The high cost of acquiring customers (the cost of acquiring customers) has always been the biggest constraint in the development of online education. Online education institutions without physical school buildings can only rely on marketing methods such as buildings, subways, and the Internet. The efficiency of customer acquisition has always been low, and the retention rate after customer acquisition is also a problem. The high cost of customer acquisition is a major factor that makes it difficult for online education companies to make a profit.
But the epidemic “just happened” changed that. An anonymous person in charge of an online training institution revealed that his company mainly operates “K12” (preschool education to high school education) online training business. Previously, due to the low acceptance of online teaching methods, the company prepared a budget for 2020, hoping to promote the “online teaching methods”.
“I didn’t expect that the total number of online users would double several times as soon as the epidemic came out, and even this budget was saved.” The source also said: “Compared to the pre-epidemic situation, the number of people studying online courses in arts including fine arts and calligraphy has increased the most, almost tens of times.”
Many online education companies have spotted this rare opportunity to acquire customers, and have launched free lesson plans with “significant results.” According to Ape Coaching, the company started to broadcast free live lessons on February 3. As of February 6, the number of enrollment for Ape Coaching free live courses was more than 10 million, and the cost of a single month of technical support was about 150 million to 200 million yuan. As of January 2020, the cumulative number of users of Ape Coaching Online Education nationwide has exceeded 400 million.
“How long will the epidemic last, we will broadcast it as long as possible,” said Zhang Xiaohu, the relevant person in charge of Xueersi. It was assessed that it would affect the children’s daily learning, and gave us instructions early to be ready to support at any time. “On February 1, as soon as the free course launched by CCTV and Xueersi was launched, it was welcomed The number of online viewers has increased dramatically, with an average of more than 2 million real-time attendees per class.
