Takarn Ananthothai, CEO and Co-Founder of Globish
English teachers of public schools in rural Thailand are not so fluent in the language. Private classes are available, but they are expensive for parents. This creates a hurdle in the career growth of rural students.
Takarn Ananthothai, former President of the non-profit AIESEC Thailand, believed there must be a better way to help local people learn English.
With this goal in mind, he asked his friend and ex-management trainee at Uniqlo Thailand, Juice Chuencheewan (who later married him), to start an edutech startup and onboard globally certified part-time teachers to address this problem.
That was the genesis of Globish.
Globish, which stands for Global English, provides online English and Chinese communication courses to professionals, kids, corporates, and schools in Thailand. It uses a simplified version of English used by non-native speakers consisting of the most common words and phrases.
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The core curricula focus on building communication confidence using post-method pedagogy combined with local contexts matching learners’ behaviours.
“At Globish, students can attend one-on-one and one-on-five discussion classes, one-on-ten instructor-led classes, AI pronunciation practices, and offline workshops using real-time updated e-learning content. They get all this in one course,” Ananthothai explains. “The variety of class sizes, teachers’ nationalities, peak time slots management and teacher incentives allow us to control the quality. Besides, we have in-house video calls and a teacher rating system.”
Students can attend live classes daily, book anytime, and speak a new language practically within six months at less cost.
In 2021, the firm expanded into Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. It hired local management and set up a subsidiary. It will focus only on business English courses in the country. The curricula and packages have been customised accordingly.
Globish’s target customer base is working professionals aged ~30 years (70 per cent) and industrial and tech companies and kids aged eight to 15 (30 per cent).
The startup employs 175 people (130 in Thailand and 45 in Vietnam).
The language learning market growth in Thailand and Vietnam is estimated to be at 5 per cent CAGR. Thailand’s market size is around US$100 million, and Vietnam’s is about US$300 million.
While many edutech players exist in Thailand, such as Skilllane, Conicle, FutureSKill, and Caribre, Globish doesn’t compete with anyone in the adult education market. However, in Vietnam, it competes with Topica Native. In the kids’ segment, Globish’s main rivals are LingoAce, PalFish, and Scholar.
Global ambitions
Globish plans to penetrate new domestic and international markets, such as the UAE, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. It will hire native coach teams of more than 400 individuals from various countries, such as the UK, the US, South Africa, Egypt, India, Ukraine, and the Philippines. The plan is to increase to 1,000 coaches to support the market expansion and achieve 500,000 classes by the end of 2022.
It has set an ambitious target of generating an income of US$35 million by 2025. “We have started expanding to one new country. We plan to add three more and reach 100 schools in a few years,” he adds.
Last week, Globish announced a US$2.5 million Series A raise from the Digital Economy Promotion Agency (DEPA), Premier, N-VEST Venture, Top Itthipat, ECG Research, 500 Tuktuks, and Stormbreaker Venture. The fund will be used to upgrade the organisation to become the edutech leader of ASEAN. The capital will help it extend its platform beyond languages to other skills.
In a limbo
The lack of trust in online education for parents and schools has been a severe issue in Thailand. During the pandemic, parents were fed up with seeing their kids in front of the laptop for six hours a day learning in a one-way classroom at school. Because of this, online extra-curricular classes were perceived as boring and ineffective.
It is also challenging and requires lots of money to set up a concurrent classroom management system and prepare a pool of teachers and a tech platform. Raising venture capital is tough compared to the Vietnam, Indonesia, and Singapore markets. So it is tough to compete with global business by being local.
The government slowly realises the potential of edutech. “DEPA puts a lot of emphasis on education, and our funding is proof. We are the first government-funded startup in the history of Thailand. However, the government needs to do more to promote the edutech sector,” Ananthothai signs off.
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