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Monday, December 11, 2006

China Education Alliance (CEDA) English website

CEDA's English website is here. This website has more details about the business model.

ABOUT US:
This talks about what they're doing overall and matches up with the SEC documents, except that it de-emphasises how new this stuff is (for good reason).

The real emphasis is on helping students "to pass their life-turning exams" which would be like our SAT tests, except that they probably have one for younger students as well.

Address: 58, Hengshan Road, Nangang District, Heilongjiang Province Harbin, People's Republic of China
Zip code: 150090
E-mail: tutukf@edu-chn.com
Fax (01186) 451 8233 5794
Beijing Office (01186) 10 8724 0586 (01186) 138 0450 6008
Harbin Office (01186) 451 8700 0662
Contact Ms. Bai or Ms. Zhang



PRODUCTS AND SERVICES:

1. The Membership System of the Test Questions from "The Big Classroom of the Elite Instructors"
Sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings. This consists of study cards and a database of over 200,000 test questions going back to the 1980s. Elementary school, middle school, and up to college.

I'm not sure why this is distributed via video-on-demand.
Each year CEDA organizes a team of education experts to produce new examination papers targeting at middle school examinations. Customers of CEDA will be able to download these resources on CEDA's website (www.edu-chn.com). As the papers are accessible through download verses print-copy, they are 50% cheaper in budget compared with traditional printed papers. CEDA also provides download of e-books, thesis papers, softwares and other resources.
They also provide the same info through the mail for those without computers.

2. Tutoring Services & Services--the On-Line/On-Campus Big Classrooms of the Elite Instructors
This is the core operation with both an online classroom (video on demand, other downloaded resources, and something like IM for Q and A) and a bricks-and-mortar "after-class" classroom and vocational courses. These are both targeted to junior and senior high school students. They intend to create more on-campus centers in other cities in the future, initially in the Heilongjiang province.

They mention the subjects covered by the online services: Chinese, English, physics, chemistry, history, and others. Online lectures, tutoring, explanations, etc. This doesn't yet cover real-time broadcast.

3. Talent Crossroads
New line of business. Student placement service, matching students and employers.

4. Wealth Island
Online competitive game involving answering "intellectual questions". The three top users "are rewarded materially". 251,893 registered users as of April 2006.

News
Some of these news items are not very important and difficult to map into what is actually happening. At some time after Aug 2005, CEDA's website had about 20,000 user visits per day and 70,000 page views.

CEDA was chosen by a vocational association in China to form a partnership of some sort. The association dates back to 1917. CEDA was chosen from "among tens domestic and foreign strong company by strong technology strength, market development ability and national market channel in network education area."

This partnership intends to form a company involved in business in the following fields:
  1. National vocational certification of fresh vocation
  2. Network education of hot vocation
  3. Undergraduate employment guide and training
  4. Unemployed worker training and employment joint
  5. Farmer worker skill training demand market joint
  6. Teacher training of vocational education item
  7. International labor force input and output
This is driven by an initiative in the 11th Chinese five year plan. I view it as a very good opportunity.
The Chinese vocational education has a large-scale market, we will get large market advantage and generous profits in vocational education area through cooperating with each other and sharing resources.
Yeah, that's the stuff.

They started the "Wealth Island Game" on March 1, 2006 for kids 6-18.

They introduced the first sex education electronic magazine in China.
Youth sex health condition has attracted the widespread attention all over the world. Youth sex education has many problems need to be solved urgently: firstly, the poor sex educating materials has not meet youth growing need; secondly, the channel for youth get sex knowledge is narrow, sex education is secret because of the Chinese traditional culture. Under this circumstance, China Education Alliance made full use of network characteristic of coverage widespread, rapid, etc., organized youth sex educators and scholars introduced the electronic education magazine—Youth Garden of Eden [so the girl bites an apple and gives it to the boy and that's how it all works?] which is suitable for youth psychology characteristic, this magazine can be downloaded online. The publication of this electronic teaching material is popular to youth readers and teachers as a result of it represents the coming of middle school and elementary school students’ electronic popular scientific reading materials, Founds the beginning of Chinese education electronic popular scientific magazine popularization method.

It enhances the reputation of China Education Alliance, and enhances visit rate by click and on-line time.
Yeah, I'll bet it increases the visit rate.

They opened "Education square of China Education Alliance" cooperating with business website "Dangdang", established 1999, largest Chinese online bookstore in the world, funded by various well-known groups such as SoftBank. CEDA will sell materials online through Dangdang (well, I'll be danged).

They formed a business partnership with the largest welding technology training base in Asia: Harbin Welding Technology Training Center (established 1984 by China and Germany). Many of the teachers studied in Germany.
The use and demand on welding talent of northeast old industrial base is the first rank in China, Heilongjiang anticipate that there will lack for about 60000 welding talents in the next five years. So the welding talent training will be a potential market. The average training fees of each person will be about 5000 RMB [about $640].
This ain't no mango farm.

InvestorsInvestor relations is Big Apple Consulting USA, Inc.
407-884-0444 or 1-866-THE-APPLE

Corporate Info

58, Hengshan Road, Nangang District, Harbin, People's Republic of China 150090

Phone:
(01186) 451 82289115
(01186) 451 82335792---8801(8807)
(01186) 451 82335793---8801(8807)
(01186) 451 87000663---8801(8807)

Press releases

FAQ

CONCLUSION

I'm impressed with what they're doing, especially the partnerships with well-established players.

Comments:
Bruce, that info on the IR group is old. The website appears to have been maintained by them (BigApple), and hasn't been updated since May 2006. As far as I can tell, the company has gone into quiet mode with regards to future guidance and quarterly earnings announcements.

BigApple Consulting is just a pump and dump shop that was only hired to create the web page, IMHO.

Of more interest to me is the recent private placement they did with several wealthy US investors and an Asian bank. They may have to raise more cash to fund their growth plans....

I agree its an interesting company, and certainly a far better value than EDU. They will have tough earnings
comp in Q4.
 
Yeah, the English website seemed fairly rough and not-so-up-to-date, but it had some good info that I didn't find elsewhere. Big Apple might be bad, but it's hard to imagine them worse than Heron working for ETLT.

I saw the bridge loan and went through the details (I didn't take notes) and I didn't see anything unusual. Seems like a potential 10% dilution at a 50 cent strike price with a 2 year expiration. In the 10-K they said they would probably raise something like $6 million in the future for expansion.

I wasn't aware of EDU and I'll go through it sometime soon. You're right, it seems pricey.
 
Robert Hsu@investorplace.com has advised the purchase of EDU for several weeks. Why no recent information from CEDA - sounds like a coming dissaster to me . . . haven't checked the SEC filings, but somebody should.
 
EDU is overpriced. I looked at it here. When you say there's no recent information from CEDA, do you mean since they filed their Q3 quarterly results on November 14, 2006 that I covered here?
 
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