From last year until now, Asian large players in the edtech market have unveiled their plan to cooperate with partners outside the country, marking an attempt to expand overseas. 

China NetDragon’s subsidiary Edmodo, an online learning community, has been selected by the Ministry of Education in Ghana as the exclusive online learning platform for its K-12 education system. Edmodo is expected to tap into more than 30,000 public and private schools in Ghana, reaching 9.3 million students and 450,000 teachers under the cooperation.

On the other hand, launched in Hong Kong 5 years ago, an on-demand tutoring app Snapask now not only operates in Hong Kong, but also in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Founder Timothy Yu said Snapask had also expanded into Malaysia and was planning to focus on markets in Southeast Asia where there is a high demand for tutoring and other private education services. It also opened a regional headquarter in Singapore last year and developed video content and analytics products for its platform. 

Meanwhile, EduSpaze, a Singapore-based edtech start-up, announced last month that it had partnered with Colombia-based venture capital studio Latin Leap. The partnership will open opportunities in Latin America for Asian tech scale-ups through the sharing of knowledge and company deal flow, and strengthen the collaboration between the two regions within the field of education.

Tapping into overseas markets for new opportunities and diverse revenue streams are new trends to Asian EdTech enterprises. From one-to-one online class to tutoring service, from language learning to diverse online courses, overseas markets have become prominent for some edtech companies.

However, growing globally may not seem to be easy for the education sector because education systems and learning culture vary from country to country. Overseas expansion entails the company’s great effort to meet the needs of local consumers, therefore it is crucial for them to adapt operational processes to the target market. Furthermore, partnerships, or at least connections, can open quite a few doors before companies establish a solid presence on the ground.

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