S Chand and Company Ltd is India’s largest education content company - a house of authors, editors and printers that has been putting textbooks into school bags for over eight decades. It began in 1937 when Late Shyam Lal Gupta founded the S Chand Group, and it has since grown from a single publisher into a listed, pan-India operation that reaches more than 45,000 schools through over 4,000 channel partners. The recurring approach is to own the content, control the printing, and then push that content through every available channel - print books, school curriculum adoptions, YouTube videos, test-prep apps, and now licensing deals with AI companies - so that the same textbook chapter can earn many times over. # Business segments A single education-content engine that earns across four formats - the core K-12 print business, a higher-education and test-prep arm, a fast-growing digital and AI-licensing stream, and a newly acquired international curriculum imprint - all fed by the same repository of titles and author relationships. ## 1. K-12 curriculum publishing: the textbook factory that funds everything else **Around 80% of the group’s operating income comes from printing and selling school textbooks aligned to CBSE, ICSE and state boards, with a seasonal rhythm that mirrors the April-to-March academic year.** - **The academic calendar is the business clock** - Q4 (January to March) delivers 70-80% of annual revenue because that is when schools place bulk orders for the new session, while Q2 and Q3 are spent developing content, distributing samples and starting the print run. - **Curriculum change is a multi-year demand engine** - the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) was revised in August 2023 after an 18-year gap, and NCERT’s April 2024 announcement of new syllabus books for Classes 3 and 6 means schools will have to buy fresh books across grades over FY25-27, shrinking the second-hand book market that normally eats into new sales. - **Own-curriculum brands lock in schools** - programmes like Mylestone, My Zen, SmartK and Solid Steps are full-curriculum packages adopted directly by schools; the refreshed “New Mylestone” alone was taken up by over 650 schools, and “ZEN” went from 300 to 450 schools in its second season, creating multi-year stickiness. - **Paper is the biggest cost, so contracts are locked annually** - paper, printing and royalties together eat up 35-45% of operating income, which is why the company signs bulk annual paper contracts every July and bills customers on a cost-plus basis, insulating margins from spot-price swings. - **A captive press and new warehouse cut dependence on outsiders** - the company owns its own printing plant and is investing Rs350-400 million in a new integrated press and warehouse facility, with the warehouse operational in FY26 and new printing lines coming by FY27, giving it control over quality and turnaround during the peak season crush. ## 2. Higher education and test preparation: the college-to-career pipeline **Textbooks for universities and study material for competitive exams form a second leg, though it is a tougher, more fragmented market where the company is fighting piracy and free YouTube tutors.** - **A YouTube channel doubles as a free classroom** - S Chand Academy, launched in FY22, hosts over 1,900 videos on science and engineering topics and has crossed 300,000 subscribers and 26 million views, pulling students in Tier-2 and Tier-3 colleges into the company’s ecosystem. - **TestCoach targets the CUET gateway** - the app covers over 100 national and state-level exams and was relaunched for CUET-UG, the single entrance test for central universities that over 15 lakh students take; within two months it had 100,000 downloads and 60,000 sign-ups. - **YouTubers are competitors turned collaborators** - the company partnered with roughly 40 YouTube influencers in FY24 to create test-prep content and aimed to double that number, converting their audiences into customers for S Chand’s paid products. - **A stake in ixamBee gives exposure to government-job aspirants** - the company invested Rs30 million in the freemium platform that has reached over 1.2 crore students preparing for bank, insurance and railway exams, and the venture turned profitable at the EBITDA and PBT level in FY26. ## 3. Content licensing and digital platforms: selling the same pages to AI companies **A high-margin revenue stream that grew over 60% in FY26 to Rs318 million by licensing the company’s text, image and video repositories to third parties, including firms training large language models.** - **The same 12,500 titles earn a second time** - the company’s back catalogue of school and higher-education books, much of it already paid for, is now licensed as raw data; the client count rose from two to four in a year, and the company is targeting Rs250-300 million from this line. - **Digital products carry no printing cost** - platforms like Mylestone, SmartK and TestCoach deliver content through apps and web interfaces, so while servicing costs are higher than print, there is zero paper, ink or warehousing expense, making margins structurally better. - **Earlier bets were spun off to attract outside capital** - the Mylestone curriculum and Learnflix app were moved into a separate SPV, Convergia Digital Education, in 2021 so they could raise growth funding from private equity investors without weighing on the listed parent’s balance sheet. ## 4. International curriculum (CPD Singapore): a small door into the world’s fastest-growing school segment **The January 2026 acquisition of a Singapore-based publisher of IGCSE and IB supplementary books gives S Chand its first products for the international curriculum market, which has over 1,000 schools in India alone.** - **Bought, not built** - the company paid SGD 1.5 million in cash through its wholly owned subsidiary New Saraswati House to acquire CPD Singapore, a publisher of guides for Cambridge IGCSE subjects like Biology, Chemistry and Additional Mathematics, with annual turnover of roughly SGD 900,000. - **The addressable market is global** - IGCSE has over 4,000 schools worldwide and IB over 6,000, concentrated in the Middle East, South Asia and Australia, and the company believes this business can scale to US$8-10 million in a few years. - **It plugs a gap in the catalogue** - before the acquisition, S Chand had no products for international curriculum schools, a rapidly growing segment in India that was entirely served by foreign publishers. # Group structure and partners **A listed parent with ten subsidiaries, a web of minority stakes in edtech startups, and a track record of exiting investments at multiples - the structure is designed to keep the core publishing business separate from digital experiments.** - **Digital ventures sit in separate legal entities** - Convergia Digital Education was created as an SPV to house Mylestone and Learnflix, and Safari Digital Education Initiatives holds the digital education assets, keeping their capital needs and risks ring-fenced from the listed company. - **Minority stakes double as R&D scouts** - a 16% stake in Smartivity Labs (STEM toys; revenue above Rs75 crore and profitable in FY26) and a 4.3% stake in ixamBee (government exam prep; turned profitable in FY26) give S Chand a window into adjacent learning markets without having to build products from scratch. - **Exits have returned cash at high multiples** - the company sold its stake in Testbook for roughly Rs180 million (7.8x its Rs23 million investment) and iNeuron for roughly Rs138 million (2.1x its Rs66 million investment), demonstrating an ability to back early-stage edtech and harvest gains.