MindChamps is up 5.8% year to date, but down 85% from its 2017 peak.
The rapid adoption of AI has led many multinational companies to announce high-profile job cuts. The chill is being felt in unexpected quarters.
For Overseas Education, which was listed in 2013, its top line has a direct correlation with the number of students enrolled. In its most recent FY2025, enrolment was down 4.7% to 2,297, snapping four consecutive years of growth since the pandemic low of 2,156 in FY2021.
In its presentation at the company’s AGM on April 30, the drop was attributed to several factors, including changes in “global employment landscapes”, where the “rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is driving significant job displacement worldwide”. The company also cited the growing number of foreign system schools in Singapore competing for the same pool of prospective students.
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For the year ended Dec 31, 2025, its revenue dropped 5.2% y-o-y to $83.9 million. However, earnings plunged 96.7% in the same period from $6.27 million to just $206,000. While the company was able to lower financing costs and other expenses, its single largest cost item, personnel, was up 4.2% to $52.7 million. It also incurred higher upkeep and maintenance costs of $2.2 million, up by nearly a fifth.
As at Dec 31, 2025, the company’s NAV per share was 32.1 cents, down from 33.3 cents reported in the previous year, with much of the value still tied to its physical campus at Pasir Ris. Overseas Education shares have been on a steady downtrend of 13.5% lower year to date. Based on May 19 closing price of 16 cents, the company is valued at $66.5 million. Overseas Education’s share price reached a peak of $1.03 in 2015.
Despite the much-reduced FY2025 earnings, the company, proclaiming that its long-term fundamentals remain intact, has declared a dividend of 0.7 cents per share, compared to 1.2 cents paid for FY2024.
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The company says it will prioritise growth in student enrolment through several methods, including refreshing and expanding service offerings and enrichment programmes; strengthening community engagement and enhancing outreach efforts through strong collaborations with parents.
Another SGX-listed education stock, MindChamps PreSchool, has seen better days. Founded in Sydney in 1998 as an educational research centre, it established its global headquarters in Singapore in 2002 and was listed in 2017 at 83 cents.
At the time of its listing, it had strong backing. Executive chairman David Chiem held a deemed stake of 52.35%, and the company’s second-largest shareholder was Singapore Press Holdings (SPH). Flush with cash from its print monopoly years, the former newspaper company was actively diversifying into other businesses, with MindChamps among them.
Following the privatisation and restructuring in 2021, the stake is now held by Cuscaden Peak Investments, a vehicle jointly owned by Temasek’s Mapletree Investments and CLA Real Estate Holdings to manage the non-media assets formerly under SPH.
Cuscaden Peak has steadily divested assets, including a portfolio of Good Class Bungalows worth $207 million, the Seletar Mall for $550 million, and, most recently, the Paragon Mall previously held under Paragon REIT, the renamed SPH REIT, for $3.9 billion. As of March 16, Cuscaden Peak’s stake in MindChamps was 19.61%, or 47.62 million shares.
Based on its May 19 closing price of 12.7 cents, the company is valued at just $30.8 million.
For its FY2025, MindChamps recorded earnings of $2.1 million, a surge from $237,000 in the year earlier. Revenue in the same period was down 4% to $60.4 million because of lower fees collected. However, the bottom line was boosted by gains from the divestment of a preschool centre at $2.9 million. In contrast, there was a $884,000 gain booked earlier.
In FY2025, there are a total of 74 centres, the same as in FY2024. These centres were held or operated under different models: company-owned, company-operated centres and franchisee-owned, franchisee-operated centres. The centres are mainly in Singapore and Australia. While the number of centres remained the same, its so-called maximum capacity was up slightly by 3% to 8,906 students.
However, the total number of students declined by 6% to 5,669 in FY2025 from 6,054 in FY2024. Just over two-thirds of the revenue, or 68%, was generated in Australia, with the remainder from Singapore.
