My father didn’t complain about my generation very much, but he had one big gripe…
He hated that we were allowed to use sophisticated calculators in math class.
You see, I come from one of the first generations of students who had graphing calculators incorporated into our coursework. When I entered high school in 1992, the popular Texas Instruments TI-81 graphing calculator had already been making waves among upper-level math teachers across the country for two years. Later in my freshman year, the breakthrough TI-82 was released.
While many of my friends were given these new $100+ tools to work with, my father told me I had to make due with my $20 solar-powered scientific calculator.
I often wonder how my old dad would react if he were around to see classrooms today, with digital whiteboards, laptops, and tablets for every student to access learning management systems… not to mention Google.
There’s so much technology available to classrooms today that kids have to develop an almost entirely different set of skills from their parents (my generation).
And this technology comes from a host of different specialty companies. Some deal with software, some hardware, some in-classroom fixtures, and some with the students themselves.
One of these companies recently filed for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it deals with specialty display technologies for classrooms.
The Company
Boxlight Corp. is a Taiwanese company that began making large touchscreens for display use back in 2001. A little less than half of the company’s revenue comes from contract display manufacturing for classrooms and boardrooms across the globe.
After 12 years of expansion into 50 countries, the company’s principal stockholder, Vert Capital Corp., acquired a Georgia-based whiteboard company that could serve as Boxlight’s inroad to U.S. school systems. It was incorporated in Nevada just shy of one year ago.
This IPO is expected to bring the company approximately $23 million and allow it to complete the acquisitions of Everest Display Inc., Globisens Ltd., and vendor Genesis Collaboration LLC so it can focus mostly on education.
According to the amended S-1, Boxlight plans to offer 1,818,182 shares at a price between $10 and $12. It will trade on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker BOXL.
The company’s strategy after the IPO will be to centralize its business management under the Boxlight USA company and consolidate its five different operating arms into one. Boxlight thinks this will help streamline its entire planning-to-sales pipeline.
Boxlight, as well as its acquisition targets, have all incurred losses for 2014 and the three months of fiscal 2015.
“We believe that this loss is primarily the result of the significant reductions in global national, state and local educational budgets and purchases due to the world-wide economic recession,” the company claimed.
But is this true?
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The Industry
In 2002, venture firms invested only about $150 million into education technology (or EdTech) companies. By 2012, it had grown to $600 million.
According to CB Insights, EdTech companies of all sorts netted $1.87 billion in funding and investment in 2014.
If that seems like rapid growth, that total was almost entirely surpassed by a single exit this year.
Back in April, professional social networking site LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) spent $1.5 billion to purchase video tutorial site Lynda.com. The company behind Lynda took the basic online video lecture concept and put a heavy layer of Hollywood polish on it.
This acquisition of Lynda helped buoy LinkedIn’s earnings because the company ended up hugely beating performance expectations. LinkedIn initially expected $40 million in revenue from the company for the full year. It has since upped that total to $90 million.
Meanwhile, education spending continues to grow. In 2013, spending on K-12 technology was $13 billion worldwide. Analysts at Futuresource expect that total to be $19 billion by 2018.
The investment capital is there. The budgetary allowances for new education tech are there. Success is a matter of providing a useful product at a sustainable profit.
If Boxlight can use these IPO proceeds to effectively streamline its EdTech operations, it will become a company that can be judged by its products and not its balance sheet.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
