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1. At a Glance
S Chand and Company sells schoolbooks, and April to June is when schoolbooks do not sell. Revenue for the three months to June 2026 was ₹114.55 crore, against ₹102.62 crore a year earlier. The operating loss was ₹9.68 crore. The net loss was ₹17.9 crore, and earnings per share came in at minus ₹5.07.
The pattern is not new. The company’s own filing notes that book sales concentrate in January, February and March, because academic sessions start in April. The three months to March 2026 brought ₹547.82 crore of revenue and ₹245.78 crore of operating profit. Then the calendar turned, and the same business booked ₹114.55 crore and a loss. Textbook publishing runs to a schedule set by school admission offices, and the accounts report back.
Three things moved inside the quarter. Content licensing, which here means selling text to buyers of AI training data, brought in ₹9.1 crore. Management puts the client count at five and wants it at ten. Paper was bought early. Management says purchases were pulled forward roughly three to four months ahead of the usual August to October window. That parked more inventory on the balance sheet than usual. Net cash still rose, to ₹118.2 crore, after a dividend of ₹14.1 crore went out in June.
Elsewhere on the page sit trailing twelve-month sales of ₹811 crore and a market value of ₹482 crore. Return on equity is 7.66%. A fifty-fifth annual general meeting is scheduled, which is more annual meetings than most listed companies have had birthdays. The business was founded in 1939.
2. Introduction
The S Chand story starts in 1939 with Shyam Lal Gupta, which puts the business ahead of Indian independence and the CBSE syllabus. It also predates most of what is currently taught in the books it prints. The company was incorporated in 1970 and listed in 2016. ICRA, a credit-rating agency, notes that the shares have traded on the NSE and BSE since May 2017. The company’s investor deck puts the operating history at more than eighty-seven years, which makes a decade-old edtech pitch deck look like homework handed in late.
Under the parent sits a small federation. The auditor’s annexure lists eleven subsidiaries consolidated into the results for the three months to June 2026. Among them are Vikas Publishing House, Chhaya Prakashani, New Saraswati House and CPD Singapore Education Services, the newest, effective 29 January 2026. Nine of the eleven were reviewed by other auditors. Between them, those nine carried ₹53.02 crore of quarterly revenue and a net loss of ₹2.53 crore.
The recent corporate moves come in a cluster. In October 2025, Vikas Publishing hived off its printing business to Shri Shyamlal Printing Press for ₹53 crore. It went across as a slump sale, meaning the whole printing unit moved at a single price. Payment was part cash and part compulsorily convertible debentures, which are loans that must later turn into shares. Both companies belong to the group, so the printing press changed rooms without leaving the house. In January 2026, New Saraswati House bought all of CPD Singapore for SGD 1.5 million, disclosed on 30 January. In March 2025, the remaining 49% of BPI was bought in, making it wholly owned.
In November 2025, ICRA upgraded its rating on ₹110 crore of facilities to [ICRA]A (Stable) from [ICRA]A- (Stable). Walker Chandiok & Co LLP, the auditors, issued unmodified opinions on both the standalone and the consolidated June quarter results. An unmodified opinion means the auditor recorded no reservations about the numbers.
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3. Business Model: WTF Do They Even Do?
The books are the ones Indian childhoods were measured in, and the same words now sell in formats those childhoods could not have imagined.
The core is K-12. ICRA, the credit-rating agency, describes schoolbooks sold to CBSE, ICSE and West Bengal State Board schools. The brands include S Chand, Madhubun, Saraswati and Chhaya, with IPP alongside them. Around that core sit higher education titles under the S Chand and Vikas names, covering test preparation and college courses. Early Learning is the third leg. The digital platforms carry names that sound like an optimistic startup incubator all at once: Destination Success, Intellitab, Mystudygear and Ignitor, with Flipclass beside them.
The scale figures come from the investor update. There are more than 14,000 unique titles and more than 3,000 authors. The company counts over 4,000 channel partners and coverage of more than 45,000 schools. The team runs past 2,000 people. Three thousand authors is not a contributor list, it is a mid-sized town, all presumably wanting royalty statements on time.
Then comes the machinery of getting a book from a press into a fourteen-year-old’s bag. Print capacity runs to 90 tonnes a day, and in-house printing accounts for 82.5% of the work. Management describes a new printing and binding facility as half completed this year, with full completion next year. Some binding and printing work shifts across from September and October. Paper, per ICRA, is 30% to 40% of operating income. The biggest input cost is a global commodity and the biggest revenue driver is a government syllabus committee.
The newest line is content licensing, described as AI datasets. Screener’s insights table records the client
