Kortext predicts international expansion will bring ‘rapid’ growth
Kortext, the UK’s leading digital textbook platform, is predicting rapid growth over the next three years fuelled by international expansion and partnerships with Microsoft and Samsung.
The Bournemouth-based business anticipates 3-4 times year-on-year growth, as it eyes contracts with universities in Europe, the Middle East and the Asia Pacific region. It has also signed a recent contract in Nigeria to provide the very first university in West Africa with a digital learning platform and e-textbook scheme. The company also has offices in the US and in Canada.
As well as continuing to build its university-wide partnerships, the next phase of growth will see the company focus on developing its consumer strategy, with the supply of digital textbooks to students and academics through a webstore. Kortext currently has partnerships with more than 40 U.K. universities.
Kortext has experienced significant growth since CEO James Gray founded the company in 2013. Following private investment, the company has secured new offices in Bournemouth’s ‘Silicon Beach’ area to support its expansion. It has also created an Innovation Lab, which will develop new products to enable Kortext to stay at the forefront of the digital revolution in higher education.
These new products will continue to push the boundaries of learning technology and provide greater accessibility by marrying hardware with content to deliver better educational outcomes for students around the world.
James Gray said: “The pace of digital change is rapid and this is now reflected in the higher education sector where students no longer want a passive form of learning. Instead, they expect technology to make learning more immersive, collaborative and most importantly, more accessible.
“We’ve had incredible growth over the past three years and are now in an exciting phase of international expansion which will see us take Kortext’s digital textbook platform global. We will work with distribution partners who have the market and technical knowledge to drive the Kortext product forward.
In October, Kortext partnered with Microsoft to integrate its digital textbook software into the Office365 cloud-based platform, which is used by all universities in the U.K. and thousands more globally. By adding over 300,000 education titles to Office365, Kortext and Microsoft are able to offer an affordable and extensive selection of digital learning materials to universities worldwide. As part of the project, Kortext is also creating a new universal Windows 10 reading app.
Key Kortext partnerships include Middlesex University, which is Europe’s largest university-wide digital textbook contract, enabling the company to provide around 18,000 students free access to their core textbooks. In addition, a separate partnership with Samsung enabled Kortext to win a contract to supply 10,000 students at the University of East London with a Samsung Galaxy Note tablet pre-installed with the Kortext app loaded with their digital textbooks.
The Kortext app is free to download giving users access to a wide range of reading content such as useful research, ebooks from the Google Play Store or journal articles, library loans and lecture notes all from one place.
For more information, please visit http://www.kortext.com/
