At 11:00 a.m., September 4, 2007, Qiming Venture Partners and Giant Global Education ("the Giant" or "the Company") held a signing ceremony on strategic cooperation in Beijing and officially announced that the company had successfully received a capital of US$20M. Together with SIG, Qiming Venture Partners led and completed the round of investment in the No.1 brand in China's extra-curricular training market. As the sole financial consultant of this financing, Gavin Ni, Founder, CEO & President of Zero2IPO Group, spoke highly of this by saying that "it is not only the most important event of this year associated with international capital entering China's education industry, but also a sign that non-governmental education in China is attracting increasing attention of the world."
Mr. Xiong Yin, chairman of the board & president of the company, founded Giant Company in 1994. Through development over the past 13 years, Giant has now grown into the largest extra-curricular education training organization for middle and primary school students in Beijing from a guitar training class, and has been awarded as famous education brands including "China Top Ten Education Groups" for many times. At present, the Company is mainly engaged in providing extra-curricular and quality education trainings for students aged from 0 to 18 and has set up over 100 branch schools in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanchang, Wuhan, Xi'an, Shijiazhuang and Zhengzhou etc. The number of teenagers that accepted trainings provided by the Company exceeded 200,000 in 2006 .
When talking about this round of financing, Xiong Yin, chairman of the board said, "we feel so honored to cooperate with Qiming and SIG as they are not only shareholders of the Company but our strategic partners able to help us build our nationwide education network as well as our brand. We feel so proud because we are absolutely the leader in Beijing's extra-curricular education market and we also greatly appreciate Qiming's abundant experience in company management, marketing, capital operation and IT administration, etc. In addition, we are grateful to the great efforts made by Zero2ipo Group in this financing, which enabled us to recognize and cooperate with such specialized investors with strategic eyesight.
Jianping Gan, managing director of Qiming Venture Partners and director of Giant Global Education Company said, "We are so excited to see that the expenditure on education in urban families has become the second largest expenditure only next to that on food. We feel so glad to have the opportunity to invest in education industry for our next generation in China. We are deeply impressed by the great achievement made by Principal Yin and his team during the past 13 years. In Beijing, almost every school student and his/her family know about the Giant brand as well as its high quality education level, we feel so honored to have the chance to build a great company together with Principal Yin."
Related officials from the People's Government of Beijing Municipality and Beijing Municipal Education Commission attended the press conference, spoke highly of the success achieved by Giant Education Group in China's education industry and pinned great hope on its developing in the future.
