More than six months after Pawan Adhikari took charge as regional director (South Asia) of Language Testing at Pearson, he tells FEs Kirtika Suneja that growing this business is an uphill task, especially when his company wants to garner more than a quarter of the market share in India. This, he says, will happen due to increased interest in the testing business from the channel partners. Excerpts:

How is the language testing market in India growing

India, China, the Middle East and Africa are the major markets for us and India is only second to China in terms of numbers. Close to 2 lakh students take English language tests each year and the market is growing at 10%. The tests happens round the year and go through their own peaks and troughs.

Which are the largest markets for English language testing

English language testing is required in many countries and countries like Australia, the US, UK and New Zealand are the biggest markets currently as students traditionally prefer going to these countries. Now new ones like Finland, France, Germany and Canada are also emerging.

How do the changing immigration norms impact your business

Immigration norms have become stricter in the UK and this does impact the number of students who want to go there to study. In essence, students who want to work there after studies are impacted to an extent, but then there are some who go abroad only for studies.

What is your strategy to capture a quarter of the market share

We want to get 25% of the market share over the next three years by increasing the size of our team and adding professional partners. The investments will be in the form of doubling the test centres from nine at present. Besides, we are also planning to explore the east side of the country, especially Kolkata from where we get 5% of the total students. As for the international expansion, Sri Lanka is our next target market.