[Daekyo] Weathering 3 decades as Korea’s tutoring king

In Korea, education is everything. Often, the name on your college diploma may determine your life path for decades to come. So parents push their children from a very young age to excel in every subject and ace every standardized test. And they send their kids to hagwon, private educational institutes, to cram.

Daekyo Group is considered one of the earliest entrants to Korea’s 30 trillion won ($26.5 billion) private education market. Its founder and chairman Kang Young-joong is credited with creating Korea’s first tutoring services network for young children that includes house calls, and is consistently ranked one of the country’ richest businessmen. In fact, Kang’s personal fortune in stock holdings reaching 728 billion won, the nation’s 16th highest, as of 2009, according to Forbes Korea.

In its signature “Noonnoppi” service, a tutor drops by the student’s home every week, checks the student’s progress by examining his or her study materials, answers their questions and gives out another study packet for the following week. This business model, a smash hit among local parents of elementary school students throughout the 1980s and 1990s, helped Kang build an education empire that now has seven subsidiaries, six sub-subsidiaries and seven overseas units in countries including China, the United States, Indonesia and Malaysia.

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