Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Prosus EdTech deep dive conference. All participants are in listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity to ask questions later during the conference. If you should need assistance during the call, please signal an operator by pressing star and then zero. Please also note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Eoin Ryan. Please go ahead, sir.
Thanks, Chris, and good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for joining us for the fourth call in the series of deep dive calls we're doing to help drive a better understanding of our businesses and the key growth initiatives within them. Today we're moving to the EdTech segment to take a deeper look at our thoughts on the sector there more broadly and the Stack Overflow more specifically. On the call with me today, I have Larry, our CEO of EdTech and Food segments, and I have Prashanth, the CEO of Stack Overflow. The team will take you through a quick presentation, and as always, we'll open it up for Q&A. As a reminder, the deck that we're going through for this presentation is available on the IR section of the Prosus website.
With that, I will turn it over to Larry. Larry.
Thanks, Eoin. Let me kick us off. Starting with slide one, you see here just the global education opportunity is absolutely massive. It's a large, you know, global category exposed to some really powerful secular tailwinds, including continuing population growth in emerging markets, which is a lot of the wave that you see here, and also improving education levels worldwide. Last, this trend of workforce reskilling and upskilling that's on the back of global digital transformation. On this slide, you see how the demand for education will flow through to specific subsectors. At the same time, that demand is met with clear pain points in traditional brick-and-mortar education that tell us that the existing structures just won't be able to address this wave of demand.
Specifically, we can point to a few things that are not working well in the existing environment. You know, rapidly rising education costs with no guaranteed outcomes, you know, jobs or certainty of returns post-graduation, not to mention geographic constraints and access, as well as pretty uneven quality in education staff and content. You know, perhaps the largest consumer pain point from what we hear is very limited personalization and customization. In short, we believe the physical institutions of the West won't be able to scale to meet the global demand for education in years to come, and that's part of the reason why we find this sector so compelling. You know, against this backdrop, we think technology holds the promise of addressing those structural issues.
If you shift to slide two, global education spending is projected to reach $7.4 trillion by 2025, and that's spread across four major segments, pre-K, K-12, higher Ed, and Workforce. By 2025, digital penetration is only projected to be about 5.5%, so there's a lot of runway for EdTech to grow. If you compare that 5.5% to e-commerce and food delivery, you know, sectors where certainly we spend a lot of time as well, those are each expected to be in the mid-20s% online penetration by 2025. So again, you see here there's a lot of room for this sector to transition online. Moving to slide three, EdTech fits really well in the Prosus investment philosophy of addressing significant long-term societal needs through technology.
We identified the EdTech opportunity relatively early. You know, started researching the sector in 2014 and made our first investments in early 2016. There we chose consumer-facing platforms with business models we knew well, like Udemy, which happened to be a, you know, marketplace focused on education, Brainly, a social network for learning, and Codecademy, a consumer-facing platform for coding education. Based on our learnings over the last eight years, we doubled down on EdTech in the last couple of years with a specific focus on workforce learning. We acquired Stack Overflow, invested in Skillsoft, GoodHabitz, and Eruditus, among some of the others featured on the slide. All told, we've invested over $3.8 billion in total and established ourselves as one of the leading EdTech investors globally.
Our long-term vision for the sector, this is one that I get asked a lot about, you know, how do we think this comes together, is to build and scale a portfolio of best-of-breed companies with a focus on Workforce while also helping to scale leaders in K-12 learning. Shifting to slide four. You know, EdTech has certainly evolved over the years. You know, many of us on the call can probably remember taking a course at a local Marriott 20 years ago or accessing static web content posted by the instructor at your university to supplement a live class. That's what we call EdTech 1.0. It's still relevant today, but of diminishing importance to the sector. Over time, shifting to EdTech 2.0, EdTech businesses started to target consumers directly.
Consumers demanded a better experience than they were getting from version one. More engaging content unlocked a large global user base and helped EdTech players build, you know, mainstream brand awareness. Still, most of the students took sort of a topic-specific single course only, and monetization is usually tied to those one-off courses. As a result, you know, user and revenue retention remained a challenge. Now, you know, many EdTech companies have emerged that bet on lifelong learning rather than one-off courses. You know, deeper understanding of the consumer in that environment unlocks a lot of lifetime value. As a result, monetization is shifting towards recurring subscription. Content is improved to include a mix of live user-generated content and asynchronous learning, providing a much more complete and engaging consumer experience.
It's important to note that in EdTech, you know, the consumer is often not the payer. You know, for those who speak to me regularly, you know I emphasize this a lot. You know, the easiest example, just as parents buy for children in K-12, employers are the primary buyer for Workforce Learning, buying on behalf of their employees. It creates this interesting dynamic where winners in the space will ultimately need a product that resonates with consumers and also to have a relationship with the enterprise buyers. It's something that we've seen over the years. It's very hard for companies to pull that off on a single platform, and we're fortunate to be involved in quite a few of those. Now to my last slide five.
This is our simplified view of the workforce EdTech ecosystem. We've assembled best-of-breed companies that cover a significant portion of what we affectionately call this sandwich. On the top, the B2C horizontal companies like Stack Overflow and Udemy provide a significant amount of consumer traffic on the back of very asset-light and highly scalable platforms. Both companies have global reach and have tens of millions of users every month. That B2C audience gives rise to B2B sales, as evidenced in Udemy Business and Stack Overflow for Teams. Udemy's unique business model combines the network effects and brand affinity of a, you know, vibrant consumer marketplace with the recurring SaaS revenue of Udemy Business.
Prashanth will talk about it shortly, but we see a similar opportunity with Stack Overflow's massive community of technologists and developers helping to drive adoption of their team's product within large enterprises. The middle layer of the sandwich includes specialized content or enabling functionalities, call it the meat of the sandwich. In addition to addressing specific learning needs of consumers, these platforms develop relationships with the enterprise where real recurring revenue sits. Many of them are increasingly solving the enterprise side through commercial partnerships or M&A. A good example of this is the recent acquisition of Codecademy by Skillsoft. Codecademy has global reach, global consumer reach and a loyal consumer following, but hasn't fully addressed the enterprise opportunity. Skillsoft can solve that right away, as Skillsoft will be able to sell Codecademy through to its enterprise clients.
As a reminder, Skillsoft has deep and long-standing commercial relationships with roughly 75% of the Fortune 1000. Now as I wrap up, I'll briefly touch on the bottom layer of the sandwich. You know, very few companies, and we're talking just a handful, are able to properly sell into the enterprise. Many EdTech companies, you know, over the eight years that we've been involved in the space, will flash Fortune 500 logos on their websites. When we do diligence, we often find that very few really sell into the C-suite and bring meaningful subscription-based recurring revenue to the table. Skillsoft and Udemy are two of the leaders in that regard. There really are just a handful of folks that do that at scale.
You know, with that as an overall frame, I'll hand over to Prashanth to talk about Stack Overflow. Before I do, I wanna briefly describe our excitement about the company and what they're building. Stack's not traditionally considered an EdTech company, but rather is an integral part of the developer workflow. Millions of software developers access the site every day, and software developers, you know, other than equity research analysts, of course, are the most, you know, compelling workforce in the world. These users engage on the Stack platform every day to learn how to do their jobs better by engaging with the community and asking and answering questions. From an EdTech lens, we found over the years that the most engaged learners are the ones that ask questions, and that Stack is the starting point for many learning opportunities.
That made Stack particularly compelling to us, in part because the opportunities that it presents for education. With that, I will hand over to Prashanth.
Thank you, Larry, and good to connect with all of you today. I'll kick off with slide eight. Even before I get started, you know, I think the best way for me to orient your minds, given I'm speaking to a financial audience, is to use a comparison or an analogy. Stack Overflow is to developers or technologists as, you know, Bloomberg data is to finance professionals, right? Finance professionals cannot do without financial data, and the most authoritative source of that data is Bloomberg. Very similarly, Stack Overflow is the most authoritative source of the most correct information on every possible technology topic, in the world. With that, you know, Stack Overflow, we were founded in 2008. We're the world's largest platform and community for technologists and software developers.
We've been building into this for the past 13 years or so. We have a very, very significant impact around the world, as I'll describe here with our scale. Our mission, which is really what motivates all of us, is to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. Moving to slide nine. You know, as I mentioned, we are the world's largest knowledge base and, you know, pretty much every possible technology topic or vertical, including the ones that Larry covered in his EdTech slide. Cloud and AI and ML and data, et cetera, all that knowledge exists on Stack Overflow, right? On the order of approximately 50 million questions and answers on these topics. This has been built by the community for the community over the past 13 years.
It's sort of a running joke in the industry that pretty much every software developer or technologist always has a tab of Stack Overflow open on their computers. I'd in fact encourage all of you to check in with any software developers in your respective financial services companies. Chances are more than, you know, nine times out of ten that they've got a tab open on Stack Overflow on their computer. Moving to slide ten. Just to give you a sense of the significant scale that we operate at. We have close to 100 million monthly visitors across our 170 websites collection of websites. That includes approximately 300,000 new monthly signups from around the world, and that number has only been growing over the past three to four years.
We're only accelerating, given where the world is going with technology. Based on our research, we do a lot of data collection in terms of polls, et cetera, into our community. We have understood that, you know, 80% of the world's developers visit Stack Overflow every week. We are certainly an indispensable part of their workflow on a daily basis. As I mentioned, significant amount of content, 50 million questions and answers. That makes us, depending on sort of the rankings that you look at, you know, a top 50 website, based on the Alexa rankings, or if you look at SimilarWeb data, that's about a top 200 website.
To give you a sense of that 100 million monthly visitors, you know, 70 million of those folks are technologists, software developers, DevOps people, data scientists, and you name it, right? That 70 million, if you compare it to, you know, other sort of communities that are out there, for example, GitHub, we're even larger than GitHub. GitHub is a community that was or a code repository platform and community that was acquired by Microsoft several years ago. It gives you a sense of scale again. Moving to slide 11. Just to give you a sense of how we are set up in terms of a company. I just described this community, right? 100 million monthly visitors across these websites. That creates a very significant competitive moat for the company, right?
That base and that foundation is very hard to disrupt, and it gives us a tremendous vantage point for us to engage with developers and technologists in a very organic and very relevant way. The two products or product lines that we have, I should say, the one in the middle that you see here on slide 11 is our SaaS business model, and that's called Stack Overflow for Teams. That is a recurring revenue business that was launched in fiscal year 2018 and is really growing very quickly, as I'll describe. The second business category that we have is our advertising business model, a focused reach and relevance business. That has a series of products, everything from companies advertising about themselves as great employers to attract developers to work for them, employer branding products.
A series of advertising products that allows tech companies to showcase their products and to educate developers and technologists about various technologies that they're launching or iterating on, or even the ability to build for tech companies to build sub-communities on top of Stack Overflow with our new product called Collectives, which we launched about a year ago. That is a really powerful and intimate way for companies and technologists and software developers to engage in very real ways. That's effectively our company. We have a community, to recap, and then we have two business lines. Stack Overflow for Teams, our SaaS recurring business, and Reach and Relevance, our advertising business. Moving to slide 12.
You know, one of the things that is very interesting about the company, and you know, why we're so excited about being part of the Prosus family, is that learning is a common thread across our products, whether it's free or paid, right? When you think about the technologist's learning flow, as Larry mentioned, all technical learning starts with a question on Stack Overflow. As I've mentioned, that's literally what software developers do every day. 80% of them visit this website to ask a question on how do I do this on Amazon Web Services, or how do I do this on Microsoft Azure or any of those sort of topics. These companies, the Microsofts of the world and Amazons of the world, are advertising on Stack Overflow, which is our advertising business, so that they can educate and do.
Commercially, our technologists can learn about these technologies from our platform and our community, but in a very organic sense. As you progress down the chain, you can see Collectives, the product that I mentioned, is a product that is focused on generating these sub-communities for companies like the same big large tech providers, and you see several that I'll mention here in a minute. That allows developers to learn in a much more intimate way about product launches and announcements, et cetera, really to have a very close iterative conversation or engagement with these companies. As you move along the chain, employer branding allows developers and technologists to learn about companies that are very attractive to work for.
Once they've actually got the job, then they leverage Stack Overflow for Teams, which is all about learning through collaboration in the workplace, as I'll describe here. Learning and EdTech is sort of implicit in what we actually do across our current products, and we're very excited also to innovate on new EdTech products in the future in collaboration with Prosus. Going to slide 13. I'm now gonna deep dive into our Stack Overflow for Teams product. Let's move to slide 14. I speak to, you know, several CTOs and CIOs or Heads of Technology, you know, and these leaders every week, right, as part of my job. They're all concerned about effectively the same topics. You know, I can summarize them in these three categories. You know, attracting and onboarding and retaining top talent.
You know, when we look at what's going on in the industry today, we've got about 300,000 tech job listings that are unfilled. Massive supply and demand imbalance there because of the great resignation and people looking to get reskilled, etc. With all this, you know, this focus on hiring and retention, there's just a significant amount of knowledge drain that's happening. You know, there's a real need to retain and reuse knowledge within these dynamic organizations. The second category is boosting team productivity and collaboration. This is all about, especially this is fueled by the pandemic, but in general, you know, we know that hybrid work or distributed work is here to stay. It's not going anywhere. It's a one-way road, if you will.
Tech leaders are desperately looking to establish sustainable ways for their teams to collaborate just beyond, you know, a bunch of Zoom calls and a bunch of chat apps or Slack messages or, you know, and so on, flying around in the company. They need a capability to do that. They need asynchronous collaboration tools to be able to do that. The third category is all about accelerating innovation. You know, now that we have access as companies and organizations to very, you know, amazing building blocks, you know, the cloud and data and ML and DevOps, et cetera, this allows companies to have the potential to move really, really fast and iterate so they can be competitive and respond to customer needs very quickly. They really need high.
CIOs and CTOs need high-scale ways to align their people within their organizations to adopt these technologies and really drive common policies and rapid and standardized knowledge sharing within their companies to move really quickly. If you move to slide 15, Stack Overflow for Teams, our SaaS business, addresses those three challenges head first, right? It addresses literally all those three issues in a very, very compelling way with a platform, mind you, that's being already used by 100 million visitors a month, as I just described. What Stack Overflow for Teams is is a private version of that public platform, which looks very similar to what the public platform that's being accessed by 80% of the world's developers. That's what it looks like on the right, as you can see here.
The value statement, of course, as a result of this, is that developer velocity is moving super quickly. They're, you know, people are getting instant and expert, relevant knowledge. They're able to access that knowledge at their fingertips. They're obviously very fast to adopt the product because it's very familiar in terms of the user interface. And it's obviously distracting, reducing the distractions rather, about all the sort of synchronous tools that are floating around the company, with and Zoom calls, et cetera. It reduces that significantly. It breaks down silos and ultimately enables companies to really ramp up new employees or reskill existing employees rapidly. Moving to slide 16, just to talk about the opportunity in front of us, and we believe it's a massive total addressable market, right?
If you think about the collaboration market, it's about a $10 billion market, $10 billion dollar market. The DevOps market, which is sort of the developer tool chain to move very quickly. That sort of concept itself, you know, that tool set is about, you know, $9.4 billion in terms of size. The collaboration market is growing very rapidly. The number of developers are growing very rapidly. Everybody wants to become a technologist these days. If you look at the bubbles on the right, you know, there are 25 million developers in the world based on Evans research. If you look at the macro bubble around that, about 100 million technologists, right? We certainly serve, as I mentioned in my opening slide, about 70 million of those 100 million technologists across our website.
We still have a great way to go between 70 and 100 million. Let's not forget that the knowledge workers bubble, which is around 1 billion people around the world, and these are, you know, folks, not just software developers, but not just data scientists, but also people in finance and legal departments that are writing code, you know, to do their work. It's not. You know, previously, financial analysts used to write Excel macros to do some of their work, right? It's also not uncommon these days for finance folks to write Python code as an example. The lines are blurring between technologists and knowledge workers. The TAM here is massive.
Slide 17, if you move to it, shows the sort of the new stack that companies are leveraging to be able to do the things that I just described, right? You've heard of these categories, of course, you know, with the cloud, with AWS and Microsoft Azure and code hosting with GitHub and developer tools that you see up here or project management tools, or you know, the much more familiar real-time chat ops tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams and Zoom, et cetera, which are highlighted in the blue box. That, you know, obviously came to the forefront over the past couple of years. What is not entirely obvious until Stack Overflow for Teams showed up is that in terms of asynchronous knowledge sharing and true internal community building and knowledge sharing, there isn't a...
There wasn't, I should say, a default tool to be able to do that at scale until Stack Overflow showed up. You know, what was existing in companies was, you know, wikis and just documents of various kinds floating around the company and other sort of less, you know, less loved platforms to be able to leverage, you know, to share information at scale. This is especially true for technologists who are very particular in how they want to be able to share information. That default and de facto company or company-wide knowledge sharing. We move to slide 18. This shows you a little bit of the traction, at least, from a qualitative perspective and some quantitative points over the past few years.
You can see here that pretty much, you know, this is a small sampling of some of our customers in our Stack Overflow for Teams product. You can see there are some tremendous names here. I can tell in terms of the verticals, you know, we have pretty much every financial institution, insurance companies, investment banks, commercial banks, et cetera, on our Stack Overflow for Teams product. You know, they're operating at very large scales, 40,000-60,000 users each, across their engineering and technologist organizations, their product organizations and so on.
I would urge you, if your company or your financial institution is not on Stack Overflow for Teams, I would encourage you and your CIO to look into Stack Overflow for Teams to drive, you know, your large scale technology transformations that you're trying to drive within your organizations. Our sectors that we cover are, you know, quite diverse. You know, beyond financial services, you know, we've got obviously technology, large scale tech companies, like Microsoft that has 100,000 users on our platform, or retail companies, some of the world's largest retailers or healthcare companies and so on. Literally, you know, no industry is, you know, immune from the fact that they need this sort of capability to move really quickly.
Moving to slide 19, I wanna explain how we go about doing this. Actually, if I could spend another minute on slide 18. Apologies. Just in terms of the metrics, you know, in terms of how fast we are growing. In fiscal year 2022, we did move pretty quickly. We grew about 68%, and our net retention rate, which is a obviously a very standard SaaS metric, is about 115%. You know, fairly close to what would be industry standard. Our enterprise ASP or average selling price is about $289,000, which is a very healthy number. Very, very, I would say, solid foundational SaaS metrics, and I'll speak a little bit more about this.
You know, we're expecting these numbers to even go much higher this year upcoming. Moving back to slide 19. Just to give you a sense of how we accomplish this, right? I wanted to sort of describe four different examples. A global financial institution, you know, I'm sure it's somebody in the a company that's in the audience today. And then, you know, global software provider with a large number of technologists on our platform, or the bottom left, global telecom provider or and global insurance provider. What we do is we generally all these companies, all their technologists, as I mentioned, are already using Stack Overflow.
What we enable them to do is to leverage that same platform by having a private version of it, because 60%-70% of what they wanna share is private in nature, not to be shared with the full public community. That's where the value comes in, that those three issues that I mentioned, that they're all grappling with, our product addresses. We start typically in a singular engineering team or a DevOps team, et cetera. It expands very rapidly from year to year because of the very familiar format, the value that the users are seeing by reducing the number of noise in the company and really being able to reuse knowledge very rapidly and so on. It really expands very organically year-over-year. You can see this explosive growth.
Net- retention rate, as I mentioned, is a great measure of showing how the customer is expanding the usage of the product across. It sort of expands not only across functions but expands globally in obviously these global institutions. It's a very rapid way to grow. Moving to slide 20. Now I'll do a little bit of a deep dive into our reach and relevance business. So let's move to slide 21. There you will see this is a range of advertising products that we are able to present to customers. It's everything from banner advertising to more contextually relevant advertising like direct to developers, or, you know, a bunch of sponsorships on.
You can sponsor a very specific technology tag on our platform, or you can sponsor an entire website, a Stack Exchange website called Site Sponsorships, or, you know, sponsor our newsletters or our podcasts, which are all accessed by literally hundreds and thousands or millions of people in some cases, and also our blog posts and so on. All of this creates a tremendous way for technology companies to gain awareness into the developer base of developers to, you know, be able to understand who these companies are and what they're building in a very organic way. Because, you know, software developers don't really want to be advertised to, but they're very open to sort of listening to very contextually relevant advertising, and we believe we've achieved that balance.
What's also exciting about this business is that especially with EdTech, there are plenty of things that we're innovating on or building at the moment that extends what we do on the public platform with, you know, our content to learning content. You'll see us look at that and explore ways to do that here in the coming months. All our, you know, many EdTech companies advertise on our platform today to showcase their courses, et cetera, to our audience. Moving to slide 22. This is a view into the product that I mentioned that we launched last year called Collectives, which is effectively they are sub-communities for tech companies like the names that you see on the right here, GitLab or Google Cloud or Intel or Twilio.
All of these are customers of ours in this Collectives program, and many more that are about to be announced. You've got people, you know, in some of these, you've got 20,000-30,000 users that have joined these sub-communities to engage in a lot more intimate way with these companies, to have those companies endorse their answers and, you know, endorse them as super users in the space. The world's best Google Cloud developer, we know who that is because they're in that collective. That's very powerful for companies and developers to sort of engage very closely. That gives the companies tremendous market insights and engagement. Of course, the developers get recognition for what they're doing and are learning very rapidly about all the innovations that these companies have got going on.
Slide 23, as I mentioned earlier, is our employer branding business, and this is the supply-demand imbalance that you're seeing as a tech hiring landscape these days. What's very interesting in our research is that 80% of technologists aren't really looking for a new job, and most of them do not want to be approached about new jobs. What's fascinating is that because Stack Overflow is such an organic place for software developers, it's a great place for companies to showcase themselves as great employers. That's why it's a very rapidly growing business for us. Also, this is a newer business for us, which we reimagined, so to speak, because we moved away from a very transactional business, which was a talent job listings business.
That's something that we did over the past couple of years. We focused and zoned in on this capability because of the insight that I just mentioned around and not, you know, just really organically enabling people to learn about companies versus showcasing job listings. All right, I'll spend another one last deep dive on our financials on slide 24 and then 25. This, I think this is a good summary just in terms of our traction and our momentum, right? If you look at the chart on the top left, it gives you a sense of the mix that I just have been describing. Our total bookings in fiscal year 2021 and fiscal year 2022 that just closed in March, end of March.
You can see that our Teams business in the blue grew very rapidly, and the orange is the consolidation of all the advertising products that I just mentioned. Just to mention up top, the small decline in the orange that you see there is us exiting the talent job listings transactional business because we wanted to make sure that we focused on just advertising and recurring revenue models and our Teams business. That's really where you see that slight decline. Without that decline, our advertising business is growing close to 30% year-over-year. You know, it continues that trajectory rather in this upcoming year. The bottom chart that you see is our Stack Overflow for Teams business.
That's really on a fantastic growth trajectory. You know, we only launched this in fiscal year 2018, but as you can see, you know, it cleared close to, you know, mid-forties in ARR this past fiscal year. This upcoming year, we're expecting this business to grow even more rapidly. It's only gaining traction even and growing faster and faster as time goes on, which is very exciting. The commentary on the right, I'll just sort of summarize a little bit of the investments that we're making across, you know, kind of these products. If you think about Teams, just to mention that at the top, it demonstrates a lot of the hypergrowth characteristics that you'd expect of SaaS businesses.
You know, it's a recurring revenue model, which is very powerful. It's got solid net retention rates of 115% because of that land and expand motion that I described to you. High enterprise annual selling price or average selling price rather of $289. We've closed multiple $1 million deals just in the past three to four months just to start out with some of these companies. Those numbers that where we're landing with these companies are only becoming bigger, which is fantastic to see, especially because it's recurring.
All this is being powered by this tremendous secular tailwinds of companies looking to modernize and innovate and really, you know, grapple with this distributed workforce, and really sort of, you know, drive all that cloud transformation initiatives and innovation initiatives, you know, forward. That's why I think we are sort of the right place, right time. Now, investments here are really to scale very significantly with sales and marketing and customer success, with this business and really both U.S. and international. Just as a quick note, our business is approximately 80% U.S. focused, 20% international. There's a massive opportunity for us for international expansion, especially since our community is global, and our customer base is mostly U.S.-based. There's huge upside here for us on that topic.
In addition to our sales and marketing investments, you know, we're obviously investing very heavily in our product and, you know, with our product-led efforts and bottoms-up adoption. This is all about how do you organically get users to adopt the product and really be able to give them insights so that they can do that in a very sort of way that's very value added, driving also sort of self-serve revenue and influence revenue from our public platform and creating that connective tissue between the public platform and our paid products. There's huge opportunity there, and we're putting in several investments there to make sure that happens well. Finally, we're also establishing very large alliances.
You'll see us make a very meaningful announcement here in the next 10 days or so, with a very large tech provider, which we're very excited about, and how we jointly sell into companies together in addition to, of course, product integration. At the bottom with reach and relevance, a lot of our investment here is to modernize our public platforms. We're making a very deliberate and specific effort on this topic this year. It's to make sure that we can operate at significant scale in the coming years and to welcome, you know, not only millions of additional users, but also thousands of additional customers on these sort of platforms. Our ads business, as I mentioned, is growing very nicely, close to about 30%.
You know, that's becoming the preferred destination for technology companies to gain the attention of developers. Of course, our Collectives and EdTech business, those investments are also beginning to show fruit. Collectives, mind you, I did mention this earlier, is also a recurring revenue advertising product. It's also very, very powerful for us in the context of moving to as much of a recurring model as possible. Customers pay the platform fee to be able to create their subcommunities.
Finally, employer branding, you know, we, as I mentioned, we've exited that transactional job listings business, and we've redefined it to be this employer branding advertising business, which is also growing very, very nicely, and you know, close to, you know, as, close to the advertising sort of, mean that I just mentioned. Very, very encouraging. One last note on profitability, just to wrap the conversation. You know, we as a company, we were profitable in calendar year 2018, 2019, and 2020, which roughly aligns to, you know, fiscal year 2019, 2020, and 2021. We know we can run a very profitable company if we want to.
What we are doing at the moment in starting this past year, fiscal year 2022, is that we're very specifically investing tens of millions of dollars, and that's a sort of four to five-year program where we want to make sure that we are very deliberately focusing on those technology investments I mentioned, scaling out our go-to-market efforts on Teams.
All our newer sort of products like Collectives and EdTech. All that is a very deliberate motion for us to really think big, with the support of our Prosus family. This is one of the benefits of being part of a long-term investor like Prosus, is that we can really build something massive here and high impact. We're excited about that. For teams, by the way, we measure all the traditional SaaS metrics that you'd imagine, the Rule of 40 and, you know, which is obviously, for those of you that are not aware, you know, the combination of the growth rate and the profit margin, which needs to be over 40%. We're nicely tracking towards that outcome.
For advertising, it's actually a very high gross margin business and in many ways subsidizes and funds our Teams investments and business, to a degree, and provides fantastic diversification for our products. We are not sort of a one-trick pony, as in terms of our product capability. It gives us tremendous shock absorbers in any environment. Because of this sort of diverse mix of high gross margin advertising and high recurring revenue, sort of SaaS business and Teams, you know, we're very sort of pleased with that balance and how we're able to sort of really fund our growth and be able to sort of accelerate.
I'm also very happy to report, as a final point, that many of the investments that we kicked off on these topics in this past fiscal year, 2022, is already paying off in fiscal 2023. We are absolutely outperforming our expectations as a business very meaningfully and well ahead of our plan and expect a very strong year. With that, I'll wrap and we'll take questions.
Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and then one on your touchtone phone or on the keypad on the screen. You will hear a confirmation tone that you have joined the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please press star and then two to remove yourself from the list. Our first question is from Miriam Josiah of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for the presentation. Just a few broad questions from me. Firstly, just on the overall EdTech market, given the acceleration that you've seen over the last two years, why do you think penetration will only be 5.5% by 2025? How do you think about the trajectory of that beyond that point? I guess near term, how are you thinking about growth post-COVID as the market normalizes? Then secondly, on just the customer base and employers, you mentioned that the paying customers are the employers. Can you give us a bit more insight as to why employers are adopting this? Then also how you think about the barriers to entry in onboarding larger businesses? Because I think you said that only companies like Skillsoft can actually get into these larger organizations.
What do you see as the barriers to entry, and how easy is it to engage with the C-suite of these top enterprises? Thanks.
I'll take those both. Thank s for the questions, Miriam. I guess first on why is penetration only 5.5% and the trajectory. I think you know we tend to describe this sector as very monolithic, and I think it helps to understand it at kind of a sub-segment level. There's a big part of that penetration that sits tied to the government, specifically in K-12. That brings some friction to the shift to online. It was actually part of the reason why you know historically we've been even more careful than we normally would be in picking our investments around K-12 because to the surprise of nobody governments tend to move slow.
The bigger factor is that thing that I alluded to where the consumer is not the payer. I think in the early years of EdTech, there was not enough focus on the consumer needs. That's part of the reason. That's one of the things that we focused on as we've invested in companies, and I think it's changing now and it's why we've chosen the platforms that we have. We look for ones that have a good consumer experience and an engaged community, along with this ability to unlock the enterprise. Then kind of building on that point to your second question.
You know, if you focus on workforce learning, you know, the origins of the space and how you get kind of access to the C-suite, it starts with compliance training. It's really the. You know, frankly, it's not the sexy part of education. But it's, you know, things like, you know, anti-money laundering training and, you know, slip and fall training, things like that that are a necessity. Those are things that are just part of good governance of large companies. They need to have programs and training in place. In many ways, that's the birth right of EdTech at the enterprise level.
It's increasingly shifting to some of these other areas in that the two big pillars would be, generically speaking, kind of leadership and business and, specific to the discussion today, tech and dev. These are table stakes for retaining employees and why employers are increasingly adopting it. You know, this need to upskill workers and in an increasingly tight labor market, consumers expect it, workers expect it. The winners in this space will ultimately have to address, you know, as you're selling into the C-suite, not just the compliance and not just tech and dev or not just leadership and business, but offer a comprehensive solution.
I'm giving a long-winded answer, but how that leads to a moat is you end up as a platform having a lot of data, some of it necessary specifically around compliance. But also you can provide information that allows the employer to understand what their people are learning, but also puts the power in the hand of the end user, the employee, to shape their learning journey.
That's helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Cesar Tiron of Bank of America Securities. Please go ahead.
Yes, hi. Hi, everyone. Thanks for the call and the opportunity to ask questions. I have three, if that's okay. The first one is on the growth potential of Stack Overflow. I just wanted to understand the key driver for revenue growth going forward, is it mainly the increase in paying users as opposed to the price that you'd be charging these users? Is that mainly driven by enterprise type contracts? Second question, just wanted to ask, I mean, you discussed a little bit about it, but just wanted to understand a little bit better the key areas of investment needed to scale up the business.
The third one would be on the long-term profitability of the business. Looking at some of the peers, it's probably in the range of 20%-30% EBITDA margin. Do those numbers make sense to you? Thank you so much.
Thanks for your question, Cesar.
Thank you for the question.
Oh, sorry. They're all yours, Prashanth.
No, thank you, Larry. No, no problem. Yeah, those are great questions. Thank you for them. Let me answer each one in order. The first one was around the growth potential, and you were asking about is it specific to sort of paying users or price increases? It's very much the former, as in paying users, right? If you just think about, again, the 100 million monthly visitors we have on our public platform, a small fraction of which are coming from, say, companies, right? There's a huge, you know, paying customer potential that we are able to really serve. And that's that is primarily the way in which we expect to sort of expand and grow within companies.
We land, as I explained, in a sort of a particular team within companies or enterprises, and very quickly expand from there, into and sort of increase the number of seats of these contracts on a year-over-year basis. That's happened organically. It also happens contractually. That's that combination. Very much, with the way we think about our teams business is split between three different segments. The enterprises, and the, as you put it, and the mid-market and SMB businesses. Those three segments, all three, are very fast-growing, and this, the problems that I described earlier, are trying to be solved by all these technology leaders in these companies. We see tremendous traction in the enterprise, I would say.
I would say that's probably our strongest performing segment, only because the bigger the company, the more sort of transformation that's being driven, the more the need to break down walls between various teams and really bring people together to learn and collaborate and share knowledge and so on. But that being said, we are also seeing outstanding traction in our SMB business, which is a very sort of organic sort of flow from our public website and also our mid-market business that's really ramping up very, very nicely. The other avenue for growth to answer the question is, as I mentioned internationally, right?
Because we are growing out a very significant team based in Europe, and we have a second European headquarters in London, and we're hiring, you know, just top talent from various SaaS companies that are based in. Because, you know, 20% of our revenues, especially in our teams business and more broadly in our company, comes from international sources. Even though our community is global. That's the question number one.
In terms of investment, as I mentioned, you know, beyond the public platform, which, you know, as I said, we're a 13-year-old company, so a lot can be done to modernize the platform to really then sort of think about not only serving those users on a from a sort of public community perspective, which we wanna do in a in a very high scale way, and to be able to experiment and innovate with new features. We have a lot of capabilities like gamification capabilities, like badges and points and reputation points and so on on the public platform. We wanna do so much more, including EdTech.
For that to happen, we need to invest in that capability to keep engagement very high and, you know, continue to sort of serve the significant increase in the number of visitors on a monthly basis and signups and so on, as I explained. Of course, on the team side, it's the investments are focused on the go-to-market side by expanding into international locations, by adding sales reps and account executives, and also the ecosystem of folks that you need around that. You know, so you need field marketing, you need demand generation folks. You also need customer success professionals to serve these customers, to land and expand these accounts.
In addition, of course, product investments, which is foundational to make sure that these products are very much sort of self-driving, if you will, within companies, when they land. These products are enabling users to say, "You know what? Answer this question because you're the expert on this topic." Or it is, you know, making sure that we've got deeper insights on how various groups within companies are engaging or even creating these subcommunities within companies, with newer concepts that we can have sort of communities of practice and those sort of things within companies. A lot of innovations that we are planning for, in addition, of course, EdTech and other capabilities that we're focused on. Your last question around long-term profitability, absolutely.
You know, we are very much, I would say, we watch, and we benchmark ourselves against sort of the best of breed SaaS companies. Within that five-year time horizon, four to five- year time horizon is when we expect to be profitable, again, based on the tens of millions of dollars of investment that I was mentioning earlier. As I mentioned also that we were profitable in 2018, 2019 and 2020, and we're very deliberately now in an investment phase or cycle in the company's history, to make sure that we prepare ourselves for this tremendous opportunity in front of us. Hopefully that answers the question, those various questions.
Yeah. Thank you so much. That was very helpful. Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you.
The next question is from Stephanie Spanoska of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
It's actually Lisa Yang. Thanks for taking the questions. The first one is a sort of broader question on the expected impact of a recession or, you know, macro slowdown on spending by, you know, consumers or corporates across your various tech assets. I mean, I understand for Stack Overflow, like you said there's quite a high visibility over revenue, et cetera, but just wondering, like, you know, if there is, you know, slowdown, do you see, you know, companies really cutting more on certain aspects like training, et cetera? How much visibility do you have at this point? Do you consider that as a potential risk? The second question is on the global EdTech market in general.
I mean, it remains extremely fragmented, and obviously we see a lot of EdTech stocks, you know, falling quite dramatically. Do you think this opens up a couple of new opportunities in terms of M&A? And what role do you see, you know, Prosus playing in that sort of broader consolidation? And the last question is on the overall EdTech portfolio. I know there's a number of, you know, different businesses within that. I mean, you said Skillshare should be profitable in four to five years' time. Could you also give us maybe a bit of an expected sort of time horizon for the entire EdTech portfolio to be profitable?
What sort of margin we should be aiming for over the medium- to- long- term? Thank you.
Larry, do you want me to take the first one?
Yeah, actually, why don't you start and I'll chase. Go ahead.
Okay. Thank you. Yeah. In terms of your question on recession-proof, and you know, in terms of the three different businesses at Stack Overflow, just to give you a sense of what we're seeing. We're seeing no slowdown in terms of any leading indicators. In fact, sort of the opposite. You know, specifically our advertising and employer branding business, those are absolutely overperforming at this point. Despite what you see about more consumer-oriented sort of news headlines with social networks, et cetera. The reason for that is because Stack Overflow is the preferred destination for all things technology, right? The
If you were to think about a flight to quality, the quality destination to advertise tech products, et cetera, is there's only, you know, probably Stack Overflow and maybe, you know, I'm not sure if there are any sort of other, you know, large scale sort of destinations for companies. That's why we have seen no leading indicators to suggest a slowdown. In fact, sort of the opposite. We've seen only significant overperformance relative to our own expectations, even through this particular quarter. Our Teams business, what's very powerful about a recurring revenue model is that, and especially given the high familiarity of our product within companies, it is very sticky. As you can see, our net retention rate is only going up.
What's powerful about the advantage that we have is that most tech leaders are concerned about, you know, this notion of shelfware, which is a product is bought and nobody actually uses it. That's typically first on the chopping block when budget considerations are being made. The great news about Stack Overflow for Teams is that adoption is very viral because of the network effects and the virtuous cycles that we're able to generate with our product. There's very little sort of, you know, it's quite a resilient business even in sort of downturn scenarios.
Yeah. I guess just building on that, you know, Prashant covered Stack. I think that speaks to what we're seeing across the sector more broadly. As it relates to the expected, you know, impact of recession, I think it's important to separate consumer businesses from enterprise. These workforce learning platforms are table stakes for large employers now. On the margin, might they, you know, if we go into a deep recession, tweak their level of spend? Perhaps. We'll see, I think, probably more sensitivity on the consumer side than the workforce side, right? Because the same employers, they still have to do compliance training in a world where, you know, Great Resignation and challenges specifically in finding technology talent.
The last thing you wanna do is remove products that allow you to attract and retain workers. You know, as we look across not just our portfolio, but the global enterprise kind of landscape, we're seeing a far more resilient business than certainly the public markets or businesses than public markets might indicate. And then going to your second and third questions, you know, about, you know, how we see the fragmentation in the space and what kind of opportunities that we see. You know, I think, you know, look, we always look for opportunity. You know, sometimes those opportunities present themselves in terms of new investments or opportunities to, you know, facilitate consolidation or even just commercial partnerships.
Where we are in the cycle now is an increasing focus on investing in our own companies. You know, Prashant mentioned how, you know, we're investing in Stack to help further scale their business. But we're also, you know, facilitating a lot of, you know, commercial partnership conversations between our companies and you know, to be clear, the bar to external M&A has risen, and that's where I think we're seeing perhaps the most changes given the external environment. Hopefully that answered your questions.
Thank you. On profitability for the entire portfolio, is there any sort of break-even target or long-term margin target?
No. I think, you know, obviously, I think there's an interesting lesson, and you will have. For those that, you know, see our group across the various segments, we always, we don't solve for a long-term profit target and work backwards, as it relates to specific portfolio companies. You know, Stack was profitable, and we saw very positive NPV projects that could be invested in. We have chosen to go into a bit of an investment cycle there, which is, you know, consistent with our history as a group. You know, we pay close attention at the company level on the journey they're on versus solving for a long-term profit target. Again, given.
If you look at the diversity of companies that we're involved in the EdTech sector broadly, you know, SaaS, margins look very different from, you know, K-12 consumer products. Some of it is an outcome of very different business models and, you know, not least some of these are investments where we're just a minority shareholder. Even if we had a specific vision on where we think the sector could land, you know, those companies have, you know, their own boards and governance to direct them.
Okay. Thank you, very clear.
Thank you. The next question is from Andrew Ross of Barclays. Please go ahead.
Great. Good afternoon, everyone. I've got two if that's okay. The first one is just to touch on the value that the broader Prosus portfolio is bringing to Stack. I remember when you announced the acquisition a year ago, part of the argument was that Prosus could open doors with big enterprises and also add value in India, which is clearly a market where Prosus has a lot of knowledge. Can you just give us a bit more color in terms of, you know, the value that the broader Prosus has added? Then the second thing is, you know, you guys paid $1.8 billion to buy Stack Overflow, and it's very helpful that you've given us some numbers today, to help appraise that.
Can you just give us a sense in terms of how you thought about the valuation, how you're thinking about it a year later, perhaps in a world where some SaaS multiples have come down? Just to give us a bit of a framework around that would be helpful. Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for the question, Andrew. I think the questions first on the value that our group brings to Stack, and actually, it might be better, you know, we're now, you know, many months into this acquisition. It might be better actually, Prashant, if you take that first question and talk about at least how you-
Sure.
experienced things so far.
Yeah, no, absolutely. Happy to and thanks for the question. You know, we've been very pleased with our partnership with Prosus and, you know, in on multiple dimensions. Firstly, from an appreciation for what we hold most dear, which is our community, which is the foundation of the company. You know, just the mission statement of Prosus is very much aligned to making an impact for a lot of people. You know, just in terms of cultural and just sort of philosophical alignment, there's significant alignment there, which is always important. Beyond that point, you know, the focus on making sure that we are scaling our capability on the platform for both lines of our business, specifically. In advertising, of course, you know, Prosus is a tremendous background in that space.
We are able to really think about new and nuanced ways to sort of provide contextually relevant advertising to our users, and that's been a tremendous sort of value for our team. In addition, of course, on the go-to-market side, Prosus has done a tremendous job of connecting us with the sister companies. Pretty much all the EdTech companies that are in the portfolio are customers of ours now. That's also, you know, that's only an initial start, and there's tremendous upside on those topics because we're only starting with things like every EdTech company can advertise on our platform to showcase their coursework, as an example. As I referenced earlier on, we're working on deeper integrations.
For example, imagine if their coursework can be surfaced in a very contextually relevant way when users are asking questions. Those sort of initiatives or, you know, high NPV initiatives are something that we are building and researching and working on, and all those things will be accretive to the company, which I think are very, very powerful. Finally, I would just say, I think in terms of access to just a broader sort of enterprise base, of course, we are collaborating closely with all these sister companies to jointly approach customers together.
Because most companies are leveraging Stack Overflow for Teams and also learning content in somewhat synergistic ways because they are trying to pipe relevant content in their workflow into technologists and developers. We're oftentimes selling into the same persona or executive buyer, which is also helpful, so to sort of connect the dots when we work together. India, of course, is a very large base for us, our second-largest user base, and we continue to see tremendous bottoms-up adoption there. You know, we are really approaching that market with a product-led approach where we launched our freemium capability, which allows customers to sign up or users to sign up for our Teams product off the website, even without salespeople.
We're seeing significant traction on that with our freemium to paid, freemium and self-serve paid products for teams on that topic.
Yeah, actually, Andrew, to your second question, you know, I think we're really just scratching the surface of the opportunity on the Stack platform, and hopefully you got a feel for that today. We're quite encouraged by the progress so far. I think if we step back, you know, multiples come down in the short term, but you know, we are a long-term investor, and true value is created over the long term. We are very encouraged by, again, the progress that we've seen so far, because you know, that's the core of what we invest in. We invest in a big global consumer need with a huge TAM and a consumer problem that's being solved at scale.
If you believe, as I do, that, you know, technology companies will continue to be the biggest companies in the world, and software engineers will continue to be the most compelling employee base in the world and growing, Stack sits at the forefront of that. We step back, and we ask ourselves the question, you know, do we have the right opportunity? You know, Stack, you know, checks that box very clearly. Does it have a sufficient TAM? You know, if we hadn't seen that so far, we wouldn't be going into this investment program. You know, do they have the ability to monetize this community? That's why we're, you know, encouraged by the progress that Prashant highlighted around teams and collectives.
Last, you know, does it have a credible management team that can execute? We absolutely believe that.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. The next question is from Silvia Cuneo of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the deep dive. First I have a follow-up to one of the earlier questions. It sounds like the independent developers users are a way of driving engagement on the free-to-use model to then monetize on the advertising and enterprise B2B side of the business. Just wondering whether there are any scenarios where you could consider monetizing this user base directly. Secondly, what's your view on skills accreditation, given it is growing in part down in a tight labor market? Is learning on the Stack Overflow platform in an organic way enough, and have you thought of providing some forms of certification? Finally, just a question about the EdTech segment more broadly for Prosus. In slide five, you showed all the areas of the workforce ecosystem.
In some of the segments you already own more than one asset, while none in others. Can you talk more broadly about how we should think about capital allocation within EdTech going forward? Thank you.
Thank you for the questions. Prashant, why don't I take the last question first and then.
Sure.
You take the first two about Stack. As you know, as we think about the sector, you know, ultimately we are sure for those that study this space closely, you see how fragmented and global this space is. Ultimately, we think the winning solutions are gonna have some element of what we tee up on slide five. Ultimately, I firmly believe that there are gonna be a handful of companies that will try to build, but ultimately, the winners in this space, and there will be multiple, will be assembled. That can be assembled through M&A or commercial partnerships.
Some of these, you know, some of the verticals, some of the features and functionalities will have to be brought into either consumer-facing platforms that build functionality, be it, you know, labs that help software engineers write code or, you know, data scientists study data. Increasingly, like the consumer platforms will build out some of these other verticals and functionalities. Similarly, the enterprise leaders will find ways to work their way up the ecosystem and find new areas that are being new interesting sectors that are attracting consumer attention. In terms of, you know, where we play in that landscape, and obviously you see the footprint we have. We start with this frame, and then we look at the company-specific opportunities. You know, the...
In some cases, you know, when we work with a Stack, a Udemy, or Skillsoft, it's about fleshing out their own consumer and enterprise experience as it relates to this landscape, but then we're always looking for opportunities within specific areas. That's assessed at a company-specific level versus solving for any kind of, you know, end game and how something here might be assembled. Prashant, you wanna take the first two?
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Your first question around, you know, our public community and is there an opportunity to directly monetize, if I caught your question correctly, versus just the enterprise B2B model. We believe, across our two product lines, if you look at Teams and our Reach and Relevance business. Our Teams business, the closest that we come to directly monetizing, the traffic and our user base is our freemium or self-serve product for Teams.
What that means is that rather than us as a team and salespeople going into companies and making the case for them to buy a private version and pay an annual contract for that, we also enable users on the website, 100 million monthly visitors, to sign up automatically with their credit card on our website to buy Stack Overflow for Teams for any initiatives that they might wanna buy. They may be part of. Let's say there's a developer that's on Stack Overflow, like 80% of the world's developers are on every day, and they're working for a company, perhaps one of your companies.
They might, you know, consider taking in Stack Overflow for Teams off the website straight, paying for them using their credit card and using it for their immediate team. When that happens at sufficient scale, then we know, you know, where these hotspots are, so to speak, and we're able to, you know, have a much more strategic conversation with the CIO and CTO and in a more sort of top-down perspective as we think about sales motion. That's the closest that we come to directly monetizing the traffic. Everything else, of course, our Teams business for the vast majority is traditional B2B SaaS model, and then SaaS sales motion rather.
On our Reach and Relevance business, again, it's sort of two-sided marketplace where companies pay us to be able to engage with these developers and technologists on the platform. That's your first question. Your second question, unfortunately, it broke up on my end on what you were asking, but I think you were saying in this tight labor market, how what is happening in terms of learning and on our website? Do you think that there are other ways in which people are learning beyond just the organic ways on the website? Is that correct? Just to clarify your question.
It was around whether, you know, for them to say that they've learned on Stack Overflow is enough, or whether you're thinking that you could provide some sort of certification to accredit these kids.
Okay. Gotcha. Fantastic question. That's very much where we're going, next in terms of our, you know, our public platform. As I mentioned earlier on with our partnerships, with our sister companies in the Prosus portfolio, we are working on, various product initiatives to be able to surface, education, EdTech content. Think about sort of, you know, course recommendations. If somebody's asking a question on Amazon about Amazon Web Services, they land on an answer on Stack Overflow. Imagine us presenting that user with a recommended course from one of our EdTech partners, and that's what we're thinking about at the moment on the public platform. That could very much lead to things like you're describing, like certifying the user of, you know, beyond all the existing, you know, certifications we already provide them.
We provide plenty of badges and recognition for each of these developers, as you know, great contributors and, you know, experts on various topics already on our website, you know, on Stack Overflow. We can very much see that as a possibility in the future, and it's just an organic part of how we're thinking about this new sort of product capability.
Thank you.
I think we have time for one more question.
Thank you. Yes. The last question is from Thomas Singlehurst of Citi. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much for taking the question. Yeah. Tom here from Citi. I work with Catherine O'Neill, but I cover the global EdTech sector, including some of your portfolio companies. You sort of addressed this in your last question. I suspect this might be more of a question for Larry, but you know, when we look at that EdTech space and the enterprise learning side and lifelong learning, there's a sense, I feel, that companies need to be able to span a wide range of content. I think the sort of phrase is from free to degree. Two questions off the back of that. Can you just sort of directly address again whether it's better to try and form partnerships between your portfolio companies or, you know, ultimately should we expect them to sort of vertically align?
There's slightly mixed messages with Skillsoft, Udemy, which is a partnership, but then Skillsoft, Codecademy, which is an acquisition. The second question off the back of that is university sort of partnerships and degrees. I mean, obviously you do have Eruditus, which is a fantastic asset, but do you feel the need to have something more substantial in that OPM space? Many thanks.
Thanks for the questions, Tom. I think on the enterprise and sort of this kind of wide range of content that's required, I think this is again where that tension emerges between the customer, which is the enterprise, and the consumer, which is the employee. The employee wants a diversity of content. Fundamentally, if you sit in the you know CEO or CFO chair, you sit back and you say, "How many different pipes am I gonna have into my company?" They increasingly want. There is this tension where CEOs and CFOs they absolutely need to have you know their compliance leadership training checked off, but then employees are clamoring for you know tech and dev and lifelong learning. We're seeing an increasing desire.
I think you touched on the question earlier in the C-suite for people to say, "Can you just solve this wide range of needs for me? We don't wanna have multiple contracts coming in." I think you see more and more of that as we enter economic climate. In terms of how we work with our companies here. You know, the companies follow their own destinies. They have their own sort of governance and boards. You know, to the extent that we can facilitate, we do. Sometimes that means we help partnerships with sister companies. You know, we have as one of the biggest investors globally, if we're not directly involved in the space, hopefully we know many of the key players, and we can facilitate introductions.
That doesn't have to be an acquisition per se, but it can be a commercial partnership that sort of brings that consumer experience together. Then last on the university side, I mentioned before to your second question how we think about university partnerships and degrees. We're super excited about what Ashwin and team are building at Eruditus. We've been intentionally careful about where we get involved in sort of the more traditional areas of the space, be it you know K-12 or even traditional universities, because we want people that are thinking about the next generation and being very consumer-focused and consumer-led. In the case of what's being done at Eruditus, that's absolutely true.
We're open to opportunities with university. Obviously, you know, the tier one brands travel very well and will be part of the future of this space. We wanna make sure that we're, as we do in all of our spaces, really focused on end user needs. Hopefully that answered your questions.
That's very clear. Thank you.
Thank you. Just to close things out, I just wanna say thank you very much for taking the time to listen in. I know we've been greedy with your time today. I hope this was helpful, and please feel free to follow up with Owen and our IR team and if there are any further questions. As a reminder, a transcript and replay will be available on the website shortly.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, that then concludes this event, and you may now disconnect.