Exclusive | How a Mother’s Day card is driving one of Hong Kong’s richest families into China’s US$572 billion education market
- The Chinese education market is expected to be worth US$572.5 billion in 2023, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com
- CTF Education is teaming up Benenden School for five campuses in mainland China
A month after his admission, the pupil sent Yu a Mother’s Day card – her first, as it came even before she had her own children.
“He wrote to me to say that I had been supportive like a mother to him, and thanked me for changing his life. I cannot tell you how much this moved me,” Yu said during an interview with the South China Morning Post. “It became crystal clear to me that this was my calling in life – education. Because it makes such an impact on people’s lives.”
A decade later, Yu, together with husband Adrian Cheng Chi-kong, the third-generation scion of the family that controls Chow Tai Fook Enterprises and New World Development (NWD), is steering a unit of the Hong Kong conglomerate into China’s education market.
This is significant because China is moving to modernise and strengthen its education system over the long term. In 2019, the Chinese authorities issued China’s Education Modernization 2035 plan, with key priorities that included improving quality and access to education from preschool to higher education stages, enhancing educational outcomes and increasing investment in information technologies.
The Chinese education market is expected to be worth US$572.5 billion in 2023, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 11.3 per cent between 2018 and 2023, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com.