Last weekend, Egroup's Board of Directors held the third regular meeting in 2023 with investors to report on the company's restructuring situation and provide directions and plans for recovery and development in the coming time.
The meeting was attended by Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Thuy, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Egroup (known as Shark Thuy); Ms. Nguyen Doan Kim Son, Head of Egroup's restructuring advisory board; Mr. Nguyen Anh Tuan, CEO of Apax English Joint Stock Company.
Egroup's leaders said that the group will continue to focus comprehensively on the goal of reviving all educational brands starting with Apax Leaders.
Up to now, Apax is a unit with many bright spots through restructuring activities. The English center chain has consolidated and stably operated 33 facilities, with 2 new units reopening in Bac Giang and Bac Ninh in May 2023.
According to the plan, Apax Leaders aims to reopen at least 48 centers.
Egroup aims to optimize business operations to generate profits. From there, it will be able to carry out the plan of finding large investment funds, bringing Apax Leaders to the stock exchange in the future and ensuring debt repayment obligations to investors.
Regarding debt settlement for investors, Egroup's board of directors said that, in addition to restructuring business operations, Egroup is looking for partners to build debt restructuring products to provide debt reduction solutions for investors.
With debt restructuring packages using real estate, Egroup focuses on searching and selecting real estate with full legal status to assign debt to creditors.
In addition, Egroup seeks out products related to life such as household appliances through reputable suppliers to assign debt to investors and prioritize payments to investors in difficult circumstances.
At the meeting, Mr. Thuy and the Egroup leadership apologized to investors for not being able to fulfill their debt repayment obligations to investors at the present time.
Egroup needs more time to recover and wants investors to share by reducing and stopping receiving interest within the next 3-5 years.
Previously, Egroup proposed 4 debt reduction options including: real estate (land and villas), investment packages to restructure English centers, English learning packages and household appliances. With real estate, investors need to spend more money to own it.
Meanwhile, on the stock market, IBC shares of Apax Holdings Investment JSC continued to decline in price, losing about 10 times over the past year, down to only VND2,300/share, lower than the price of a glass of iced tea. IBC is the only subsidiary in the Egroup ecosystem to be listed (Egroup holds more than 42%, Mr. Thuy holds nearly 6.2%).
IBC has just been transferred from controlled to restricted trading since May 23 due to the delay in submitting the 2022 audited financial report by more than 45 days. IBC has not yet announced its first quarter financial report.
Apax English is a fast-growing English center system in Vietnam. Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Thuy has the ambition to make the business grow in scale but has encountered many difficulties due to poor business management.
Speaking directly to VietNamNet newspaper at the end of 2022, Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Thuy admitted that Apax English had developed too quickly.
The businessman from Hanoi said that since mid-2019, he had planned to reduce borrowing costs, restructure from debt to capital raising, and approach investment funds and raise capital in 2020. However, the Covid-19 pandemic occurred and that plan was also changed.
Mr. Thuy said that when on the winning streak, the business went quite fast and encountered a big stumble in 2019. This was also the time when Egroup opened the most English centers, operating for a very short time and then had to close.
There was a time when businesses lost nearly 1,000 billion VND in 6 months. Interest and financial costs made businesses "extremely difficult".
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