Mr. Larson: First of all, we are in the postsecondary higher education field and we are a global company. We have operations worldwide in North America, US, Canada, the UK, UAE and we recently acquired a quality group of schools in France. We have progressed significantly in the last year since we spoke last November and all of our key strategies have really taken hold. For example, we continue to do acquisitions. In February, we acquired a nine-campus group in France with more than 4,000 students. We completed two new startup campuses in 2002 and we are well on our way to completing four startups in 2003 in the exciting markets of Las Vegas, Houston, Atlanta and the Detroit area. We transplanted 12 programs from school to school in 2002 and plan to accelerate this transplant number to approximately 50 in 2003 to include curriculum in the education, healthcare and criminal justice areas. In January, we announced that we divided our company into two distinct operating groups to be poised for future growth: The Colleges, Schools and Universities Group and the Online Education Group. The Online Education Group consists of American InterContinental University Online and offers 100% online degree programs to people who are seeking an 'any place/any time' way to get the education that they need. AIU- Online has expanded quite rapidly since its inception in April 2001 and at the end of January we had more than 3,000 students in a variety of programs. We continue to see this business grow and expect revenue to be between 200 to 300 million by 2005.
TWST: How many students are currently enrolled in your programs?
Mr. Larson: Currently, we have more than 55,000 students in our
51 campuses.
Tickers included in this excerpt: CECO
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.