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Keep an eye on Carl Loo, a Hong Kong entrepreneur who's about to announce some significant news in online education. Loo is chairman of NextEd.com, which was founded in 1998. Already, it offers 15 degrees that can be earned totally online in everything from business to nursing -- mostly from Australian universities such as the University of Southern Queensland and the Australian Catholic University. NextEd packages courses and content from the universities and markets them across Asia and currently serves about 2,500 students.
Now, Loo is ready to make some big new moves. For starters, he confirmed to Business Week Online that he has commitments for a $15 million investment in his company from such heavyweights as the GE Equity investment arm of General Electric Co.; J.H. Whitney, the Stamford (Conn.) private-investment company; and China's SCMP.com, the Internet publishing unit of the South China Morning Post. This year, he's also adding six new Asian, Australian, Canadian, and U.S. universities to his roster of partners. By 2001, the company expects to have 10,000 students logged on.
Loo is counting on his new partners to give his company a major boost. He has big hopes the partnership with SCMP.com, which has been aligning itself over the past year with various e-savvy partners to expand its growing Internet business. The new ties to SCMP.com could lead to further partnerships through Kerry Group, which controls the South China Morning Post.
HIGH-TECH TRAINING.
Kerry, which in turn is owned by Chinese business magnate Robert Kuok, has connections to a number of sectors in China, and relationships abroad. It's already moving into for-profit education in Asia though a joint venture with New Delhi-based NIIT, an information technology institute that's franchising its high-tech training centers throughout China. Loo hopes the connection can help NextEd hook up its e-learning content with NIIT's schools. He cautions, however, that NIIT and NextEd have not had any formal discussions.
Loo's new ties with GE could also come in handy. CEO John F. Welch and the Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji have rubbed shoulders lately and decided that an executive course for elite Chinese business leaders would be best delivered from GE's U.S. corporate-education hub. A group of Chinese executives will travel to the U.S. in May to start class. Welch also sits on an advisory board created by Goldman Sachs Chairman Henry Paulson to help launch an executive management course, with content from Harvard Business School, in the fall of 2000 at China's Tsinghua University in Beijing.
All that makes Asia a hot market for all sorts of educators right now. Loo figures 25 million students were enrolled in Asian colleges and universities last year -- and 600,000 more were studying abroad, half of them in the U.S. But Asian universities can't begin to keep up with demand for training in business and high-tech subjects. "Most Asian universities have a difficulty coping with the explosion of [info-tech] knowledge," says Loo. "Hiring and retaining staff in the [this] area is
a major problem across China." For Loo, that problem that spells major opportunities.
Copyright 2000 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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