The EDTECH market in the first quarter showed an increase in revenue by 16%
The TOP-100 of the largest companies in the field of online education in the first quarter showed total revenue of 37.6 billion rubles. With an increase of 16.4% year by the year. Experts associate the trend with the adaptation of companies and their orientation to increase marginality. At the same time, the segment of educational platforms actually stagnates: as part of the optimization of budgets, the companies reduce the costs of corporate EdTech.
“Kommersant” got acquainted with the study of the analytical company Smart Ranking about the results of the first quarter in the online education market. It follows from it that the total revenue of the TOP-100 of the largest EDTECH companies in Russia in January-March reached 37.6 billion rubles, which is 16.4% higher than the level of the previous year. This indicator exceeds both the total dynamics over the past year (15%) and the results of the previous quarter (12%), the company said. At the same time, last year the market growth rate slowed down – from 22% at the beginning of 2024 to 12.3% in the fourth quarter. The growth in the first quarter in the Smart Ranking is associated with the stabilization of the market, in particular, the adaptation of companies to new conditions and their orientation to increase marginality.
The leader of EdTech remains Synergy (revenue 3.28 billion rubles, an increase of a year by a year 21.9%). With a minimum gap is Skillbox Holding (owns VK; revenue 3.25 billion rubles, height 5.5%) and Skyeng (3 billion rubles, height 6.2%). Yandex Workshop increased revenue by 8%, to 2 billion rubles, taking fourth place. For the first time, the TOP-10 included the company “100 Ball Tutor”: in the first quarter, the revenue of the platform increased by 175% of the year and amounted to 1.1 billion rubles. The second place in terms of growth is occupied by the “MSKUL” (1.3 billion rubles, an increase of 44.5%). This confirms the high activity of the segment of preparation for the exam and the OGE, the study says.
The most sustainable segment of the growth of revenue remains a children’s education: in the first quarter, it grew by 31.6% year by the year, to 14 billion rubles. So, the segment exceeded the volume of the market of additional professional education by 11%. The latter over the period increased by only 10.4% and amounted to 12.6 billion rubles.
The “developers and platforms” segment retained positive dynamics at the level of 7.2%. A number of companies notes the reduction in expenses on EdTech in the corporate segment, due to the general optimization of budgets. For example, MTS reduced about 2% of the group employees (see Kommersant on December 20, 2024), Forbes reported on the reduction in IT last October last year. Against this background, the HR-platform for the training of the Equio personnel did not reach planned indicators, says its commercial director Leonid Butakov: “It is interesting that several customers have completed the projects with us, but none of them chose another platform-employees’ training was simply frozen, and temporarily abandoned the HR platforms.”
However, other market participants – Yandex Workshop, Skillbox, Foxford, Ultimate Education – are satisfied with the results of the first quarter as a whole. “The EdTech market has a high interest in artificial intelligence technologies,” says Ilya Kurmyshev, general director of Yandex Workshop. Skillbox note an increase in interest in educational programs in marketing, management and design, the co -founder and general director of the holding Sergey Popkov lists. The top manager also notes the record profit of Skillfactory for the period from joint magistrates with leading universities.
The general director of the “100 Ballic Tutor” Eric Kovalev talks about the successful set of students who continue to pay for training in the subscription model, as well as the active sales of short courses at the end of 2024. In the first half of the year, the Ultimate Education is traditionally focused on the adaptation of internal processes and strategies, the group general of the group Pavel Moseikin notes: “As part of the new organizational structure, we combined the schools with a similar audience and complementary grocery matrices in two clusters.”
Smart Ranking predicts that this year the market will return to sustainable growth by 15–20% per year. But representatives of the online platforms continue to observe increased competition, increase in price dumping and reducing the availability of educational services against the background of a high key rate. “Clients offer discounts up to 50% of anchor prices, which exerts pressure on the market and weakens it,” said Leonid Butakov.
