Market price and company ValueI decided to respond to some of these posts not because of the few people who comment here, but the hundreds that potentially read them. Credibility of my company is important to me and should be to any owner. It is not also just for myself, our company, but the people that work here, our partners and shareholders. Sorry for any typos. Getting this done before going into the office.
“Never judge a book by its cover.” I am sure most have heard this quote before. This is the same when a company’s value is determined only by the stock price. Many people have asked me why would someone ever pay such a premium over market value? My first question back to them is what do you know about our company? Many have said not much and that is the problem.
When you understand why we are thinly traded (many holding their stocks, no real IR in place), then when you understand our business itself, you will start to see the value. Here are some examples why they agreed to pay a premium. This is public knowledge.
1) We have entered into a market that is exceptional hard to do business. Many global educators have tried and have been unable to succeed for many reasons. In order to do business in India, to transact in local currency, a company must establish operations there. This entire process took us a very long time. Well over a year, excluding banking processes. Most do not realize this, but most Indian’s do not have credit cards (close to 98% of the population). This might seem trivial, but it is a barrier for all foreign online educators since their systems typically only take credit cards. Indians do have pretty much everything else from mobile wallets, net banking, debit cards, but a foreigner needs to establish operations in India in order to transact with Indians. There are many groups like PayPal and others that have been working to establish gateways in India, but they are still not yet there. Many issues for them. We have established ourselves as this connection for educators into India. We are able to operate there.
2) Our vision is to provide access to education to everyone. In a population of over 1 billion people, that is a huge undertaking. I know it, you know it. However, to create mass visibility, one must have access to those who provide mass visibility. It took several years but we partnered with two of the larges media groups in India that reach over a billion people on a regular basis. Combined, they have provided betterU with over $40M in marketing dollars to spend to create this visibility we would need. We just started using this media this year as you will see in the press releases. It is also way too expensive for a single educator to purchase mass marketing in India. Partnering with us gives them massive exposure.
3) You will not find another platform that brings together education from KG-12, tutoring, Higher ed, skills development, industry specific, job preparation and much more from global educators and employers on one platform. We have educators now from 9 countries that have joined betterU and we are representing thousands of courses and growing.
4) We have spent years travelling the world, speaking at conferences, at schools, in government, to corporations about our vision and through the collective collaboration of educators we can make a huge difference within emerging markets. This has led to many significant partnerships that are now supporting betterU.
5) We have built significant corporate and government partnerships within India and aboard, signed deals to support the training of millions of people and much more. Again, all of these things are public knowledge so I am not sharing anything that isn’t already there to be read.
6) We have invested a significant amount of our own money to build this business over the last 5 years because we know the size of the problem is also significant and we are passionate about making a difference. The total addressable market is one of the largest in the world and we are pioneering the advancement of the only platform of its kind for emerging markets.
7) The Investor after performing their due diligence realized our value was much greater then the market price. The combined partnerships, investments, time to build, barriers to entry, deals signed, vision and addressable market…is what is building our value.
betterU is an asset-light company. We are very much like the models of Uber and Amazon and other such companies. We don’t link to another company’s content. We formally partner with them, we integrate their materials onto our platform and they intrust in us to collect all registrations and payments and through an API, the users are then connected into their learning environment. These are trusted relationships that we also marketed through our platform, print media and more. I hope this gives you a little more details into betterU. There is still so much more to us, so please look it up.
All the best, Brad