India’s largest education company Educomp Solutions has formed two 50:50 joint ventures (JVs) with Raffles Education, Asia Pacific’s biggest private education group.

The Indian JV is for professional education pursuits, whereas the China JV is for K-12 business initiatives.

Both the companies will make equal contribution in joint ventures, which will open up growth chances for both the parties in Asia Pacific’s two largest economies.  

The Indian JV is likely to bring in the complete set of the group’s specialized development programmes and courses to the country, offering up Educomp’s large student population with significant options when they graduate from high school.

Presently, Educomp works with six million school pupils and desires to expand its reach to 10 million students by the next two years (2010).

Under the JV terms, the existing Raffles Design Institute in Mumbai will be merged with the JV operations.

The 50:50 partnership will be rolled out by the next two to three years.

Chew Hua Seng, the founder and CEO of Raffles Education Corp, stated, “This venture with Educomp will provide the group with a new growth engine and accelerate our expansion in the fast-growing Indian market. With over 657 million youths, India has the largest population of young people in the world.”

In China, the two companies will partner with each other to bring the complete range of Educomp's extensive programmes and products for K-12 students in China.

Educomp will leverage its wide content development capabilities in India, which includes a large group of 400 developers, 3 development centres and its subsisting pool of intellectual property of more than 16,000 digital curriculum content modules for K-12 schools in China, including its successful Smart_Class programme.

While commenting on the China JV, Shantanu Prakash, Managing director, Educomp, said, “Raffles is the leading education company in China, which is one of the largest K-12 education markets in the world. Through this JV, we'll be able to reach out to millions of Chinese students efficiently.”

Educomp shares, on Tuesday (May 27), gained Rs 37.7 to settle at Rs 4017.05 in the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). The total volume of shares traded was 17,347.