Skillbox will be divided into classes – Newspaper Kommersant No. 229 (7430) dated 12/09/2022

The online school Skillbox, which is part of VK, is expanding its offline business: the company buys a stake in Grafika in order to jointly develop drawing and programming schools through franchises. Going online platforms offline contributes to the growth of brand awareness and the search for a new audience, experts say. Now there is low competition in this market segment, so the format may be interesting in the regions, experts say. However, they still have many questions about the quality of such education.

The Skillbox educational platform (part of VK along with GeekBrains) will buy 10% in the network of drawing schools for adults and children Grafika (Creative Education LLC) by the end of 2022, the companies told Kommersant. Its participants do not disclose the amount of the transaction, but note that the school’s entry into the holding “is not yet planned.” The Grafika network consists of 56 offline drawing schools in the cities of Russia, the USA, Kazakhstan and Belarus, at the end of November 2022 its turnover exceeded 50 million rubles. per month.

As part of the agreement, Grafika and Skillbox will create a joint venture that will “scale Skillbox’s offline business”: by the end of 2024, the companies will open more than 70 schools under the Skillbox brand (they will teach programming and design to adults, marketing and management will be added later) in the cities of Russia and CIS and more than 100 Grafika drawing schools in Russia (courses from the basics of drawing and painting to digital illustration for adults and children).

The business will develop according to a franchising model, Skillbox specifies. The franchisee must pay a lump-sum fee of an average of 2 million rubles. Investments in the opening of one Skillbox school are estimated at 8–10 million rubles, a source close to the partners specified: “These are the costs of repairs, branding, purchase of equipment, marketing, salaries.” Skillbox and Grafika have already opened seven Skillbox offline schools in Krasnodar, Kazan, St. Petersburg, Voronezh, Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk.

Traditionally, adult education franchises develop much more complicated and slower than children’s education franchises, so plans to open 70 schools look quite ambitious, notes Franshiza.ru expert Anna Rozhdestvenskaya.

Meanwhile, the entry of online schools into the offline segment has become a clear trend in recent years: Netology has been developing offline courses since 2014, Uchi.ru acquired a stake in the CodeClass network of offline schools in 2021 (see Kommersant ” of June 8, 2021). In the offline format, the overall level of brand awareness increases, says Pavel Moseykin, CEO of XYZ School (part of Ultimate Education).

EdTech projects can find a new audience through offline projects, adds Dmitry Zakharov, CEO of Moscow Digital School: “Offline learning is still relevant, especially for officials.” Igor Zakomorny, director of the network of offline circles Uchi.ru, considers the prospects for offline training in IT professions in the regions to be higher, since “many people there still consider offline training to be a more suitable format for themselves, especially when changing professions.”

But at the same time, the development of offline schools in the regions will require the use of reduced tuition prices, which can become a problem, warns Pavel Moseikin. He explains that the school organizer will not be able to afford a significant reduction in cost due to rent and other factors: “Offline in terms of cost reduction is much less flexible than online.”

The absence of alternatives may make it easier to maintain sufficiently high prices. “If we talk about the format of such franchises, then the competition between them is now low,” explains Vladimir Sinitsyn, COO of BBE (Bang Bang Education). for rapid scaling. However, Mr. Sinitsyn emphasizes, the quality of education they can provide is “still not clear.”

Valeria Lebedeva