'Worst is over, you’ll only see growth in coming months'

NEW DELHI: After six stressful and tough learning months, Byju Raveendran is back in the game, consolidating the loss-making acquisitions like WhiteHat Jr and optimising the rest, while doubling down on opening more physical tuition centres.

According to him, “the worst is finally over” and there is only “growth ahead” as seen in the company’s FY22 financial results.

The edtech company with nearly $22 billion valuation went through an ordeal as it delayed the audited FY21 financial reports for nearly 18 months, inviting government scrutiny and serious questions from the public.

The FY21 report is out, with massive losses to the tune of Rs 4,500 crore, while BYJU’s needs to pay the rest of the acquisition amount (about Rs 2,000 crore) to global VC firm Blackstone in the $950 million Aakash acquisition by September 23.

He said he isn’t worried at all about paying the rest of the acquisition money as the core education business is doing excellent and it has a healthy cash reserve of more than $1 bn.

“The losses that you see in FY21 is because 40 per cent of the revenue got deferred on account of two things: revenue recognition change because of streaming revenue getting recognised over the period of consumption of the product,” Raveendran explained.

He said the other reason for the audit delay was that EMI or credit sales were getting recognised after the complete significant collection was done.

“There are the main reasons for audit delay, apart from the initial reasons like Covid and then the complexity of our business moving from a single product, single geography offering to multi-product, multi subsidiary offering across the world,” emphasised Raveendran, adding that while the revenue got pushed out, the cost expenses during the financial year did not.

In 2007, he founded the test preparation business Byju’s Classes, and in 2011 Raveendran founded Byju’s with his wife, Divya Gokulnath.

Last year, he went on an acquisition spree. The edtech unicorn made at least 10 acquisitions for a cumulative transaction value of about $2.5 bn - including Delhi-based offline test preparatory services provider Aakash for $950 mn.