Took a vacation from the threads this past couple of weeks to catch up on a bunch of other projects.
During the past few weeks I have had the chance to have several in-depth conversation with the management of CPT and have talked with directors from two of the major online education sites (http://www.universityaccess.com/) and (http://www.viviance.net) and also a few people very familiar with the new Global NASDAQ system. When I go really heavy into a company I don?t like to leave any stones unturned <ggg>. After talking with all of these individuals and taking another hard look at the potential of both SEG?s Online Trading Portal Model and the Online Education Industry in both China and Worldwide I am more comfortable than ever with CPT being my core long term holding. I have continued to buy shares on this latest dip and have not sold any shares since I started buying in mid-February.
I am still very excited about the potential for SEG but in the past few month I have really started to here a buzz about the potential of the online education industry. The thread has been mostly concentrating on SEG but with CIBT have almost exclusive access to 1/5 of the world?s population this is definitely not a holding I want to discount.
Dain Rauscher Wessels analyst George Sutton just completed a study of the online learning market:
"The Next Internet Platform: Business to Learning (B2L)".
Sutton's study forecasts that online learning will become the next area of explosive Internet growth as the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets mature. The study estimates the education market represents a total of $700 billion a year in sales, from which online courses could take a considerable slice.
There was a recent article in the April 2000 edition of the Red Herring titled ?VC?s are learning to love Internet education?
Basically the article stated that the online education business is just starting to capture a share of the venture capital pool and that - ?the education space is interesting for investors because "you're doing good things for the universe, and because it represents a large economic population worth billions of dollars," says Ted Dintersmith, principal at Charles River Ventures.?
The September 6, 1999 issue of MacLean?s magazine reported that according to International Data Corp. (?IDC?), about 15 percent of all post-secondary students or 2.2 million people will be enrolled in online courses by 2002 in the United States, compared with five percent last year. The article also reported IDC as stating that in North America, the Web-based learning market will grow to $8.3
billion by 2002. Gerald Odening of Solomon Smith Barney reported in October 1998 that the spending on post secondary education in the United States was $225 billion US.
stockhouse.ca
Toronto, ONT, April 27 /SHfn/ -- As the market recovers from its recent bout of hyper-volatility, StockHouse caught up with Canaccord Special Situations Analyst David Wong to get his insight into a few new up-and-coming sectors that he sees as tremendous growth opportunities. In this broad-based interview, Wong shares his thoughts on the emergence of three hot sectors that he sees as the real future for Internet stocks; online education, application service providers and bricks & mortar with online extensions.
Online education is starting out slowly, working against the tide of established practices but as Wong sees it, a sector that is starting to be recognized as the next big growth prospect. As online education takes shape, the initial platform will have an interactive environment where students will still have their regular curriculum together with an array of research resources as well as access to their professors and teaching assistants over the Internet. Initially at least, the online resources will be supplemented with the traditional classroom instruction from a live professor. Increased bandwidth will inevitably lead to the choice of video conferencing where you will have the professor stationed in the classroom while his instruction is broadcast real-time, around the globe. Further, there will be interactivity features attached to the broadcast where students can access further resources.
Wong sees online education as a sector that has yet to come into it's own, "There are a lot of great companies and creative people in this sector. We're expecting to see more of these companies going public." While the sector may have some road to travel in terms of broad acceptance, Wong views growth as inevitable "This space is enormous."
Best Regards
KEITH |
