AmInvest maintains ‘buy’ call on Prestariang

KUALA LUMPUR: AmInvest Research is maintaining its “buy” call on Prestariang on news it has entered into a deal with OpenLearning Global (OGPL).

The deal involved a subscription agreement with OGPL and its founder and CEO for up to five million new A shares of OGPL and about three million convertible preference shares for a total consideration of A$5mil (RM17mil).

Prestariang’s final equity interest determined by a performance band.

“Based on the latest information available, OGPL remains unprofitable but expects to break even in 2018 and aims to achieve a profit after tax of A$9mil in 2020.

“Should OGPL achieve the targeted profit after tax, Prestariang will receive an effective shareholding of 14.3%.

“In contrast, any shortfall in the profit after tax target could see the shareholding progressively rising to 24.3%,” said will be AmInvest Research.

The objective of the agreement is to venture into the cloud-based higher education markets domestically and regionally.

OGPL operates a platform for learning management system and massive open online courses (MOOC). It has revenue share agreements with 66 higher educational and vocational institutions across four countries and over 900,000 students in its database.

Having secured an agreement with the Higher Education Ministry to set up and operate the National MOOC Platform for public universities, it also has a considerable foothold in the local education market.

Noting competition from more established names like Udemy, Udacity and Coursera, the research house is leavings its forecasts unchanged with a fair value of RM2.08 a share until “further earnings clarity”.

“We continue to like Prestariang for its leading position in the ICT training and software distribution space in Malaysia and its SKIN project, which is expected to beef up net profit by more than eight times from financial year 2016 (FY16) to FY18.

“We also continue to like the counter for its recent tie-up with Alibaba Cloud and Conversant Solutions to develop EduCloud, which provides potential for new revenue streams,” it said.

We continue to like Prestariang for its leading position in the ICT training and software distribution space in Malaysia. AmInvest Research