
Photo: IC Photo
The growing class of offshore-listed high-tech education stocks from China is about to gain a new member.
This time it’s a company called GSX Techedu that’s just filed to make a New York listing, with a fundraising target of $220 million through a sale of American depositary shares, according to the company’s newly filed prospectus.
Like many of its recently-listed peers, GSX relies heavily on online bells-and-whistles to make its education offerings easily accessible and quickly scalable. “We are laser-focused on online live large-class tutoring,” it boasts in the opening pages of its prospectus.
But unlike many of its peers, the 5-year-old GSX is actually profitable. It reported a profit of 17.7 million yuan ($2.6 million) in the first three months of this year, reversing a 13.3 million yuan loss for the same period a year earlier. This year not only marked a major milestone in terms of profit but also for revenue, which jumped more than five-fold to 269 million yuan in the first quarter.
Those profits and soaring revenues are likely what’s boosting GSX’s confidence as it jumps into a market that’s already quite crowded with other publicly-listed high-tech Chinese educators.
Many of those haven’t exactly been star performers since their listings due to investor skepticism about their losses and future growth prospects. The latest to list, Koolearn, has traded mostly sideways since its debut in late March and is now down slightly from its offering price. Others that listed even earlier are faring much more poorly. Sunlands Technology now trades at about a quarter of its IPO price after listing early last year, while Rise Education trades about a third below its offering price from late 2017.
Related: Could Online Learning Stocks Contain the Next Alibaba?

