New Oriental Education – This Company Grows at 138% In The Past 12 Months (Guest Post)
This is a company that has returned 138% in the last 12 months for investors as the company is looking to grow even more in the next few years which spells opportunities if you are looking into a growth play.
This post was originally posted here. The writer, Brian Halim is a veteran community member and blogger on InvestingNote, with username known as 3Fs and 1800+ followers.
The company last closed at it’s historical high at $122.72 and it is continuing to grow at a very fast double digit topline growth in the next few years.
Company Overview
Founded in 1993, New Oriental Education & Tech Group (NYSE: EDU) is the largest provider of private educational services in China. The company has an extensive network of over 1,261 learning centres that span across 56 different cities. New Oriental was the first successful Chinese educational institution to be listed in the New York Stock Exchange through their public offering back in 2016 and it has a market capitalization of over USD14 billion today.
The company has a substantial presence in Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan, where combined they have a total presence of 245 learning centres, or close to 20% of their entire portfolio.
Beijing: Beijing has one of the fastest growing population in China, as the number of people living in the city grew from 13.5m in 2000 to 20.1m in 2019 (source: worldpopulationreview). In terms of GDP per capita, Beijing has also outperformed the rest of the cities by growing at more than 8% per annum, despite the ongoing Trade Wars threatening the slowdown of their growing nation.
Shanghai: Shanghai currently ranks first in terms of population density as the modern revolutionized city appeals to International expats and locals to come to Shanghai for both work and live. It currently houses a population of about 26m but has the infrastructure capacity to double its living population in the city to 50m by 2050 (source: shine.cn) through their urbanization transformation in the region and strong economic growth.
Wuhan: Wuhan is a surprise inclusion because of its strong economic growth and infrastructure transformation over the years, the city has recorded one of the highest rate of historic population growth over the years (source: wiki-wuhan). To date, their population stands at about 10.6m, which is about half the population size of Beijing.
Financial Performance
Revenue has increased by 26.5% year on year from $2.4m in FY2018 to $3.1m in FY2019 and has grown at a CAGR of 19.8% over 5 years.
This is mainly due to both the organic aspect of growth (152 new facilities and learning centres added in FY2019) as well as inorganic growth through the successful implementation of the optimization strategy coming in from the K-12 After-School Tutoring division and U-Can Middle School, which grow by 28.5% and 27.2% respectively.
Gross Profit margins continued to remain resilient at 55.5% in FY2019, despite coming in slightly lower than the 5-year average of 57.3%.
As the company seek to embark on its expansion plan, the company has correspondingly incurred higher costs for marketing and other SG&A related costs such as salary and rent as there are higher headcounts to account for. …
