Aptech Plans Arena Presence In 40 Countries

Information technology training major Aptech Ltd plans to extend the 'Arena' brand to around 40 countries in the next 18 months. At present the Arena brand has presence in 7 countries.

Pramod Khera, chief executive officer, Aptech, said: "We believe Arena is going to be the next big power brand and the target is to expand the brand aggressively to 20 countries in the next 12 months and to 40 in the next 18 months."

On the reasons for promoting Arena separately, Khera said: "Aptech has consciously developed 'Arena', the multimedia brand name, as a separate brand because we forsee an exponential growth worldwide in the multimedia segment. Also, teaching multimedia requires a different set of infrastructure and skill."

 

Arena currently constitutes around 12-13 per cent of Aptech's revenues and offers training in multimedia, animation and web engineering.

Arena has also forged alliances with Macromedia and Apple Inc as well as academic partnerships with a few internationally renowned universities. The division currently has 225 centres in 7 countries.

Aptech is also working on broadbasing its training courses and tailoring them to meet the requirements of other sectors of the industry.

While the focus so far was centered around IT and IT-enabled service segments, the company is now attempting to locate areas for providing training for non-IT industry, but with a focus on IT, said Khera.

Aptech currently has its centres spread over 2,436 locations in 52 countries. Of these, 235 are outside India.

Aptech has recently restructured its operations involving a demerger of its training and education business into a new company to be called Aptech Training by transferring its assets and liabilities of the training arm to the latter.

Simultaneously, its unlisted sister concern Hexaware Technologies is to be merged into Aptech. The merged entity will be subsequently called Hexaware Technologies.