China’s top private education provider eyes expansion in first-tier cities as step towards global brand

Bright Scholar Education, the largest operator of K-12 international and bilingual schools in China by number of students, plans to open facilities in Beijing and Shanghai as the next step in its market expansion.

The company has also set an ambitious goal of becoming a global education giant in the longer term by establishing schools in Britain and the United States, the company’s top executive told the South China Morning Post.

Based in Foshan city, Guangdong province, Bright Scholar was founded in 1994 by property tycoon Yeung Kwok-keung, who also owns China’s third-largest homebuilder Country Garden, to tap into a growing upper-middle class willing to pay a premium for Western education.

The education company listed publicly in New York last month, raising US$157.5 million.

“We plan to start a school in Beijing or Shanghai as soon as possible, hopefully in 2019,” chief executive He Junli told the Post in Foshan. “This will largely strengthen our brand power. If we can be the best school in Beijing, we will be the best school across the nation.”

Despite the fact that there are already over 80 international schools in Beijing, He said Bright Scholar was confident in drawing students from other schools, citing figures to show that 87 per cent of its international school graduates in 2017 received offers from the top 50 global universities under QS world rankings, including Cambridge and Oxford.