S Chand’s Second Life: How an 87-Year-Old Publisher Survived Covid, Edtech Boom and Now AI Era

There is a useful distinction between a company that survives and one that merely continues to exist. The first understands that survival is not passive. It requires abandoning things that once worked, accepting losses that cannot be avoided and imposing order when growth itself has become disorderly. For S Chand, an education publisher that has lived through 87 years of changes in classrooms, curricula, technology and consumer behaviour, this distinction became painfully clear after 2018-19.

By then, the company had done what many businesses spend decades trying to accomplish. According to Saurabh Mittal, Group CFO of S Chand, revenue had grown from roughly ₹100 crore in 2010 to about ₹800 crore in 2017-18. The company had raised capital, made acquisitions, expanded its workforce and built a much larger organisation around what had once been a relatively simple business: producing educational content and selling it to schools, teachers, students and distributors.

But scale had brought its own disorder. By the end of March 2018, S Chand had around 2,800 employees and nearly ₹585 crore tied up in working capital. Then, following a government policy change on CCE etc. that altered the market and led to a large amount of stock being returned, almost 30% of the stock the company had sold came back to it, according to Mittal.

The consequences were severe. S Chand reported its first loss of roughly ₹67 crore and another loss of around ₹111 crore the following year. “Those were two very difficult years and a wake-up call for us,” Mittal says.

The response was not to find another growth story. It was to resize the company itself. S Chand shut almost 22 offices, brought employee strength down from about 2,800 to around 1,800 and closed underperforming verticals. Fixed costs fell by roughly one-third.

More importantly, management began monitoring where the money was actually going. S Chand studied whom it sold to, who returned the most stock and who paid late. Over two to three years, it blocked around 20-25% of its customer accounts. Receivables, which Mittal says had once stretched to nearly 300 days, came down to around 150 days.

The objective was simple: sell only where the company could collect its money on time.

From growth at any cost to responsible growth

The numbers explain why that restructuring mattered. Mittal says S Chand generated around ₹38 crore in operating cash flow on roughly ₹800 crore of revenue in 2017-18.In FY26, S Chand's revenue from operations was ₹798.7 crore, up 11% year-on-year. EBITDA stood at ₹144.9 crore, with an 18.1% margin, while PAT rose 21% to ₹73.1 crore. The company remained net debt-free and ended the year with a positive net cash position of ₹104.8 crore. Operating cash flow stood at ₹74.7 crore.

“When you are growing organically, you're not pushing too much and you're generating a lot of cash,” Mittal says.

That philosophy now sits at the centre of the company's strategy. S Chand has moved away from treating only revenue growth as proof of progress. Mittal says the company now generates roughly ₹75-100 crore of cash a year through what he calls responsible growth, with more than ₹100 crore of cash on the books at March-end in each of the last two to three years.

Covid and the return to the classroom

The restructuring began before Covid, but the pandemic tested whether the new discipline could survive a genuine shock.

Schools closed, education systems were disrupted and S Chand’s business suffered as students stayed home. The company had to reduce costs again, with employees accepting salary cuts ranging from 20% to 60% for 15 months, according to Mittal. He says the company barely lost anyone during that period.

“I don't think anybody prepares for it,” he says. “But when it comes, you have to be there, stand up and think. You have to bring everybody together.”

Covid also forced S Chand to confront a more fundamental question: what exactly was its place in an education system that was suddenly moving online?

The company had entered digital learning well before the pandemic, but Covid became a natural experiment in what digital education could and could not replace. Mittal saw the limitations within his own family. His son was in Class 9 when Covid arrived and spent two years learning from home, while his daughter completed roughly a year and a half of engineering education online. When she eventually returned to college, he says, the change was striking.

“The person she came back as was completely different,” he says.

For Mittal, the lesson goes beyond pedagogy. “I think it's not only about what you're learning. It's about how you become, and your ecosystem is more important.”

That experience reinforced S Chand’s belief that digital tools can supplement education but cannot easily reproduce the social environment of a classroom.

The company’s own digital platform offered another lesson. It once had more than 30% of enrolled users participating, although some had free access. Mittal says utilisation was around 15% at one point and has since fallen to barely 2-3%. Online testing and mock examinations continue to have a role, but convenience alone did not create sustained engagement.

The conclusion was not that digital education had failed. It was that education had proved more resistant to technological disruption than the edtech boom had assumed.

Why the textbook survived the edtech boom

S Chand's business mix has changed substantially over the years. When Mittal joined the company in 2006, higher education accounted for roughly 60% of the business. Today, he says, it contributes barely 8%.

The company increasingly shifted towards school education, building its catalogue through acquisitions including Vikas Publishing (Madhubun), Saraswati House and regional publisher Chhaya Prakashani. The objective was to create a more complete school portfolio across Indian and central boards rather than depend on isolated categories.

Around 80% of S Chand’s business now comes from K-8, according to Mittal, where the company believes physical textbooks remain particularly resilient.

The argument is not simply that books are better than screens. It is that textbooks sit inside a larger institutional system involving curriculum, teachers, examinations, parents and schools. As long as schools remain open and curricula continue to be prescribed, core educational content retains a relatively resilient position.

That also explains why S Chand is no longer aggressively looking to buy more K-12 publishers. Mittal says the portfolio is substantially complete, although regional opportunities remain. West Bengal, for instance, represents a significant state-board market, but regional publishers can be difficult to acquire because their owners are often reluctant to sell.

Its January 2026 acquisition of CPD Singapore Education Services reflects a different calculation. S Chand acquired 100% of CPD Singapore through its subsidiary New Saraswati House for SGD 1.5 million, marking its first international acquisition in the K-12 segment. CPD publishes supplementary books aligned with Singapore, IGCSE and IB curricula.

The distinction matters. S Chand is no longer acquiring simply because it needs to become larger. It is acquiring where an asset can make its existing system more complete.

From selling books to licensing knowledge

The bigger test now comes from AI.

Unlike Covid, artificial intelligence does not simply interrupt the education system. It threatens to change the value of the content itself. If a machine can explain a chapter, solve a problem, generate exercises and answer a student’s question in seconds, what happens to a publisher that has spent generations producing educational material?

Mittal's answer is notably restrained.

“I don't see it being completely disrupted. It will be augmented,” he says. “Basically, it's another tool in our hands. I don't see it replacing anything.”

S Chand is already working with partners on AI tutors that can be integrated with its books. But the challenge has shifted from finding AI to deciding which AI is actually useful. Mittal says the company receives proposals almost weekly, but management must determine which partner can produce reliable answers and genuinely improve learning rather than simply place a chatbot beside a textbook.

At the same time, S Chand has discovered another way its traditional content can participate in the AI economy: as intellectual property.

The company has been licensing its content for AI Model training, creating a new revenue stream alongside textbook publishing. AI is also emerging as a meaningful revenue stream for S Chand. According to the company, revenue from content licensing, grew by more than 60% year-on-year in FY26. The company is now targeting revenues of more than ₹40 crore from content licensing in FY27, and believes the revenue stream has significant potential to grow further in the coming years.

Mittal told us the business was around ₹32 crore last year and could eventually become a much larger share of revenue, although the business remains developing and revenues can be lumpy.

The economics are potentially different from textbook publishing. Instead of selling one book to one student, S Chand can license intellectual property to multiple customers. The company has previously said such arrangements are generally non-exclusive, allowing its content to be licensed repeatedly.

This gives an 87-year-old publisher an unusual second life. Content once printed in millions of books can now become training material for machines.

The company is also looking beyond India. Mittal expects the international business to reach roughly ₹80-100 crore over three to four years, potentially contributing 7-8% of revenue. International curricula offer an attractive opportunity because premium schools are less sensitive to textbook pricing and books can command higher prices, according to Mittal.

S Chand is therefore not abandoning the physical book to chase the future. It is trying to make the intellectual property behind the book useful in more markets and more forms.

The marketing advantage of an institutional business

S Chand's model also differs sharply from the consumer-led edtech companies that once appeared to be its natural competitors.

Edtech companies often have to create demand among parents and students through advertising, discounts, influencers and performance marketing. S Chand’s business is structurally different. Schools and teachers are important decision-makers in book prescription, making the company fundamentally B2B.

Its marketing therefore works more like institutional influence than consumer acquisition.

S Chand conducts roughly 4,000 workshops a year with schools, covering subjects, teaching methods, online education, AI and robotics. It works with around 3,000 channel partners and maintains relationships with key distributors. It also takes groups of principals on education tours to destinations including Finland, Switzerland and Singapore.

There is conventional advertising too. Sourav Ganguly has been the company’s brand ambassador for around seven years, with campaigns across television, radio and outdoor media, including trains. But compared with consumer internet companies, S Chand’s marketing remains relatively indirect.

Its most important question is not necessarily how many people saw an advertisement. It is who decides which book enters the classroom.

That institutional relationship may prove as important in the AI era as the content itself.

What S Chand learned from its crises

Perhaps the clearest sign of S Chand’s transformation is visible in Mittal’s own job. Although he is the Group CFO, he says finance occupies only around 10% of his time. His responsibilities now extend into strategy, content licensing, technology, HR, processes and the problems that fall between departments.

The promoters give managers considerable freedom, he says, but freedom comes with responsibility. His greatest irritation is not failure itself but the shortcut.

“As long as you follow the process, it will make things right. But if you take shortcuts and if you're not completely engaged with what you're doing, then that becomes a problem,” Mittal says.

Then comes the principle that perhaps best describes the company that emerged from its crisis:

“Either do things with conviction or don't do them at all. No half-baked measures, because then you will never get the results.”

There is something almost severe about the philosophy, but it explains S Chand’s last several years better than the language of transformation does.

The company did not discover a magical new market that rescued it. It reduced costs, cut working capital, closed offices, abandoned weak businesses, clarified its strategy and learned to generate cash.

Then Covid tested that discipline.

Digital education tested its assumptions.

Now AI is testing the value of its intellectual property.

Each time, the question is essentially the same: what must remain, and what must be surrendered?

For an 87-year-old publisher, longevity is not evidence that the world has remained stable. It is evidence of the opposite. S Chand has survived because the world around it has repeatedly changed, forcing the company to decide which parts of itself are essential and which are merely historical baggage.

Its second life, therefore, is not about becoming a technology company. Nor is it about defending the printed book against the machine. It is about understanding that neither books nor software, classrooms nor algorithms, are permanent sovereigns in education.

The sovereign is the ability to remain useful.

And for S Chand, after years of expansion, two years of losses, a pandemic and an edtech reckoning, that may be the one thing it can no longer afford to forget.