It was on the horizon, one hour ago this made the news:
The company, which provides mostly English conversation courses, reportedly had liabilities of 43.9 billion yen and will be delisted from the Jasdaq Securities Exchange on Nov. 27. Nova had a 50% market share among foreign language schools in the financial year from April 2002 to March 2003, according to a government statistics cited on Nova’ s Web site.
After being in business since 1981, this is a major event for Japan’s English education market as NOVA was said to be the largest provider of language teaching services on the market. A Friend tells me that embassies are jumping in to help teachers who have been fired in the process and are now in financial distress. Several hundred thousand students are also probably never going to get their money back.
Who will fill the gap is also a question I asked: I don’t see it being Softbank or even one of the other big three. I think there is too much to overcome, but others say it’s too big to let it fail.
I think the other schools will pick up most of the students. They won’t get refunds, but they want to practice English, thus they’ll cut their losses with NOVA and go somewhere else.
Andrew, that’d be 300,000 students. I’m not sure the competition can handle that many people.