Adding to Byju’s woes, the ministry of corporate affairs (MCA) earlier this month wrote to the edtech major, asking it to explain why it had not yet filed its results for financial year 2021, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
On July 4, the country’s most-valuable edtech company, had said its audited financial results for FY21 would be announced in the next 10 days (around July 14) after Deloitte had signed off on it. But, over a month after that deadline, the results still haven’t been made available.
As mandated by the regulators, private companies have to file their annual results with the corporate affairs ministry within seven months of the financial year-end.
Emails sent to Byju’s did not elicit a reply till the time of going to the press on Thursday. But FE has learnt that Byju’s has already responded to the MCA.
The 17-month delay in filing its financial results comes at a time when the company is planning to go public and is also struggling to manage cash for its operations. To reduce its cash burn, the company confirmed it has so far laid off nearly 1% of its 50,000 staffers, but its employees have debated that the actual numbers were much higher.
Till now, the company has raised roughly $5 billion in capital and is valued at over $22 billion, which has helped it acquire more than 12 companies in 2020 and 2021, when the edtech sector was booming, thanks to lockdowns because of which students were forced to learn from homes. But after the Covid-related restrictions eased, schools and colleges have resumed physical classes which has slowed the pace at which edtech firms were growing and put them in the midst of a consolidation phase. Since the beginning of this year, companies like Byju’s and Unacademy have increased their focus on hybrid classroom models, where students get to learn both from online sessions and physical classes, with plans to open several offline centres.
SoftBank-backed Unacademy, in an interview to FE, had said it would open about 15 offline centres by July 9, but it still hasn’t been able to do so.
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