Open English, the leading online English-language school in Latin America, this month began rolling out its services for the US market. On the back of its success in Brazil and Latin America, reaching over 300,000 students, the company aims to target Hispanic communities, the county’s largest growing minority group.
There are some 53 million Hispanics in the US and, according to the PEW Hispanic Center, 68% of Hispanic immigrant adults say they do not speak English or don’t speak English well.
“There’s potential for great social change if we’re able to carry out our mission of helping Hispanics here in the US reach fluency”
Open English founder and executive chairman, Andres Moreno, said expansion in the US was a natural move after seeing organic growth in the country over the last few years.
“A lot of our consumers in Latin America have friends and family that live in the United States so as a result business has been growing here without us ever marketing, or marketing aggressively,” he toldThe PIE News.
“We thought there’s really a business opportunity here, and the potential for great social change if we’re able to carry out our mission of helping Hispanics here in the US reach fluency.”
The company targets young professional learners who are keen to improve their jobs through better English proficiency.
With almost 20 million working Hispanic adults in the US who consider their English proficiency limited, Moreno is confident Open English can reach a similar audience to what it found in Latin America.
“In an emerging market if you know English you can be a bilingual call centre rep or you can actually speak English at work in an office,” he commented. “It just gives you a whole new grounding.”
Thanks to a worldwide network of teachers, the Open English model allows student access to a native English speaker 24 hours a day and over 2,000 hours of multimedia content.
The company gained popularity throughout Latin America with its humoroustelevision commercials that highlight the difficulties Spanish speakers have learning English pronunciation or contrast traditional brick and mortar classrooms with online learning.
Founded in 2006, the company has raised $120 million so far to fuel the expansion which has begun in Florida with plans to take it to the rest of the US.
[Source:-The Pie News]