Going to sea is a long-term exploration.
Source: Know
Author|Feng Wei
Recently, Mi Wenjuan, founder and CEO of VIPKID, gave a rare public speech to share the relevant progress of VIPKID in the overseas business.
Mi Wenjuan pointed out that when considering overseas business, the first thing to determine is what kind of market to choose and what advantages you have in these markets.
At present, VIPKID has explored different product forms for different needs, including VIPKID's products directly facing families, as well as cooperation with local institutions to provide online resource support and other services.
At the same time, in the face of the educational characteristics of different regions such as United States, Korea, and Viet Nam, VIPKID has also launched suitable products.
These are also new developments after VIPKID launched its overseas AI speaking product Mastar, landed offline picture book museums in Beijing and Chengdu, and launched a number of overseas study tour projects.
At the VIPKID annual meeting in January 2018, Mi Wenjuan issued a call for the new year to her proud "super team", which mentioned: "Every partner must continue to break and rebuild, constantly transform, and through hard work and innovation, to benefit and change the society; Be a hero to your children and teachers. ”
Time flies.
Next month, VIPKID will celebrate its 11th anniversary.
01
Go to sea: land with different products
In August 2017, VIPKID officially launched Lingo Bus Chinese 1-to-1 products and officially announced the official preparation of the Korea station in November of the same year, laying out the Korea market.
At that time, going to sea had become a new direction for VIPKID for itself.
Until the beginning of 2022, a VIPKID insider revealed to Duozhi.com, "Lingo Bus carries the group's expectations. ”
At that time, Lingo Bus summarized three points: improve the level of products and services; a healthy and sustainable operating model; Let Chinese products test the waters for the internationalization of VIPKID as an explorer.
And VIPKID's international exploration is indeed not limited to Lingo Bus.
According to public information, it is found that the areas where VIPKID is more active in online courses are currently mainly in Korea, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Viet Nam and other places; In China, it began to vigorously expand its research business in Singapore, United Kingdom, Thailand and other places.
Take overseas business as an example:
In January 2022, VIPKID's international products were introduced to the Arabic market, and the United States school business entered more than 14 states in the United States, teaching more than 10,000 courses per month;
In June 2022, "VIPKID Rice Technology" tweeted that it began to lay out the Korea market in November 2017 and set up an office in Seoul, Korea, and as of 2022, VIPKID Korea has 28,000 registered users and 5,000+ paying users;
In September 2022, the international Saudi station and Viet Nam station were launched successively;
In August 2023, the international Japan station will be launched;
In September 2023, VIPKID completed the international business layout in Singapore, Viet Nam, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Korea.
Most of the above attempts are also reflected in Mi Wenjuan's public sharing this time.
"When VIPKID went to make the sea, we considered United States, Korea, the Middle East and Viet Nam as our preferred markets. ”
"In terms of model, the market families we are targeting in teaching Chinese are Chinese families and foreign families who want to learn Chinese, so they will choose the Lingo Bus platform to learn online."
"So for the needs of English, we have explored a model that is different from directly serving customers, which is to cooperate with some institutions to expand the local market."
"In this model, we will provide products and services directly to users in Viet Nam, Korea, the U.A.E. in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia."
"In some parts of the United States and the Middle East, we work with local partners, such as ETS, Pearson, and when they need some high-quality teachers to be sent, we will open up high-quality teacher resources to help local students enjoy these products and services."
……
Duozhi also reported this year that VIPKID's virtual oral language coaching product "Mastar", which was launched in a low-key manner in the app store, is also aimed at the Viet Nam market, and the product introduction homepage and the language used after downloading are in Viet Nam.
This can also be seen as part of its attempt to go to sea.
02
Mi Wenjuan: Going to sea is a long-term exploration
Duozhi has compiled the full text of Mi Wenjuan's sharing, which mentions the recent situation of the landing of Lingo Bus and the differentiated services provided by VIPKID in response to the language learning needs of different countries:
Good morning everyone, I'm Mi Wenjuan and I'm from VIPKID.
Just talked about my true love for Tencent Cloud, I basically didn't sleep all night and flew to Shenzhen in the face of Typhoon Capricorn. Then I am also very grateful to Tencent Cloud for giving us very strong technical support and very good service in the past two years in the process of exploring going global, as well as reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
I would like to take this opportunity to share with you the path we have been exploring over the past two years.
In terms of products and services, VIPKID is an online Chinese and English language learning platform, which can be regarded as a service to go overseas.
In terms of products and services, we have some very unique quality and scale advantages that are unique to Chinese enterprises. This also allows parents to give VIPKID great trust and support when choosing a platform to learn Chinese and English.
In the past, VIPKID has delivered 300 million 1-to-1 online high-quality courses in Chinese and English. From day one, our teachers are professional English teachers from the United States, with an average teaching experience of 8.5 years. Of course, the Chinese teachers we hire in China are also very good.
As a result, we have served more than 2 million students and 200,000 teachers in the past. In the minds of parents, VIPKID is also one of the go-to platforms when it comes to online language learning.
In 2020, we were named one of the top 100 best employers in United States, a ranking higher than Apple. At the same time, if you search for online teaching on Google, that is, Teach Online, we show teachers the number one brand.
When we think about going overseas, the first question we have to consider is what kind of market we choose and what unique competitive advantages we have in such a market.
We think in this way, language learning is a relatively fast online development market, especially during the epidemic, children and adults are learning online, at this time language teaching, especially real foreign teacher teaching, whether it is English learning or Chinese 1 to 1 is obviously more suitable for online choice.
As a result, its penetration rate is also constantly increasing.
From 4% in 2017 to 15% in 2026, we see that 1.7 billion people will choose to learn a second foreign language in this data, of course, there will be a market of 25 million people for Chinese learning, and 1.5 billion people for English learning.
Therefore, when we look at the global language trading market, the first criterion is that it must be a market with large enough demand, and at the same time, its ability to pay and willingness to pay should be strong.
So as we mentioned in our discussion just now, we need a unique product competitive advantage.
So when VIPKID went to make the sea, we considered United States, Korea, the Middle East and Viet Nam as the preferred markets.
In terms of model, the market families we are targeting Chinese are Chinese families and foreign families who want to learn Chinese, so they will choose the Lingo Bus platform to learn online.
So for the needs of English, we have explored a model that is different from directly serving customers, which is to cooperate with some institutions to expand the local market.
In this model, we will provide products and services directly to users in Viet Nam, Korea, the U.A.E. in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia.
In some parts of the United States and the Middle East, we work with local partners, such as ETS, Pearson, and so on, when they need some high-quality teachers to be sent, we will open up the resources of high-quality teachers to help local students enjoy these products and services.
Among them, the Korea market has a more interesting feature, the penetration rate of education and training in the Korea market is 87%, between English learning and mathematics learning, parents will put English first, that is, more family training spending is spent on English.
So this is a very important subject for Korea families, before, Korea many providers provided Filipino education services, we provide a very special product here, that is, we are United States teachers, and then online 1-to-1 high-quality teaching and services, then there are many parents who choose to go to VIPKID to learn English.
In addition, our services are localized, but the faculty and product supply are international.
After talking about the Korea market, I will talk about the Viet Nam market, we are facing local students in Viet Nam, and local training institutions carry out online product and service cooperation, they come to the market, we do high-quality product delivery.
In the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, they have national 2030 plans, which hope that children can learn English and connect with the world, so they also have a great demand for English and Chinese learning.
The Viet Nam just mentioned, they will also make English a compulsory subject in 2023 and add it to the exams for grades 3-12, so parents have suddenly paid more attention to it.
Finally, I would like to talk about the cooperation model with partner institutions and partners.
Under this model, we have served more than 100,000 primary and secondary school students in United States, and in the process of United States the epidemic, in response to the shortage of teachers and the decline of children's learning level, United States the government has allocated a fund for schools to procure, and send teachers through social institutions to provide children with one-to-four small class ability tutoring in reading and mathematics online.
Such a product and service also greatly alleviates the pressure of their teacher shortage and helps children to carry out personalized improvement.
One of our largest projects is to serve 3,000 primary school students to learn to read at the same time, in this context we have developed a new product model to help 8,000 university students learn English in Saudi Arabia, to help all English teachers in the city of Ullah, Saudi Arabia to improve their English proficiency and teaching ability, and in U.A.E. international schools, when children are not good at English proficiency, we provide 1-to-1 course services, and the U.A.E. Ministry of Education, We are also in discussions with them about how to bring our skills to the global promotion of the Arabic language.
In the end, I would like to say that going overseas is definitely a long-term exploration, and for VIPKID, I hope to bring our world classroom to every place in the world, so that more children and teachers can benefit.
On the one hand, we have a lot of this kind of technical tackling, and when we need it, the Tencent Cloud team will definitely be stationed in our office, and it is said that there are still people working there overnight.
Another example is the ability of audio and video like this, which is also very core, if the experience is not good, then the course will not work properly.
And then there is the ability of AI, I think it is good to have a real one-to-one teacher in online education, but in the era of AI, this high-tech ability must also be added.
At this time, all of our AI capabilities such as oral training, oral assessment, and content analysis in online classes are all helped by Tencent's partners.
Finally, as a CEO, I feel that Tencent Cloud is helping me to reduce costs and increase efficiency from the perspective of a CEO, and improve the deployment of the entire cloud. Solutions that make our future R&D lighter are also very helpful to us.
So no matter what typhoon there is today, I must arrive at the meeting site, on the one hand, share more with you, and then ask for more advice, hoping for more cooperation.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Tencent Cloud team for their support, and hope that everyone can set sail and cheer together on the way to the sea.
END
Author: Feng Wei
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