General information and education, not investment advice. The author is not a SEBI-registered adviser or research analyst. No recommendation, no promised returns. Markets carry risk including loss of capital. Figures may not be current. Always consult a SEBI-registered adviser.
1. At a Glance
Q1 FY27 revenue: ₹114.55 crore, up from ₹102.62 crore a year earlier. Operating profit: minus ₹9.68 crore. Net profit: minus ₹17.9 crore. EPS: minus ₹5.07.
Before anyone reaches for the smelling salts — this is what April-to-June looks like at a schoolbook publisher, and it has looked like this for years. The company’s own filing notes that book sales concentrate in January, February and March because academic sessions start in April. The March 2026 quarter did ₹547.82 crore of revenue and ₹245.78 crore of operating profit. Then the calendar turned, and the same business did ₹114.55 crore and lost money. Textbook publishing runs on a schedule set by school admission offices, and the P&L simply reports back.
Inside the quarter, three things moved. Content licensing — selling text to AI dataset buyers — brought in ₹9.1 crore, from a client count management puts at five and wants at ten. Paper was bought early: management says purchases were pulled forward roughly three to four months ahead of the usual August–October window, which parked more inventory on the balance sheet than usual. And the cash balance went up anyway, to ₹118.2 crore net cash, after a ₹14.1 crore dividend went out the door in June.
Elsewhere on the page: TTM sales ₹811 crore, market cap ₹482 crore, ROE 7.66%, and a fifty-fifth Annual General Meeting scheduled — a company old enough that its AGMs now outnumber most listed companies’ entire existence.
2. Introduction
The S Chand story starts in 1939 with Shyam Lal Gupta, which means the business predates Indian independence, the CBSE syllabus, and roughly everything currently being taught in the books it prints. The company was incorporated in 1970 and listed in 2016; the ICRA report notes the shares have been on the NSE and BSE since May 2017. Eighty-seven-plus years of operating history, per the company’s own investor deck, is the sort of number that makes a decade-old edtech pitch deck feel like a homework assignment handed in late.
What sits under the parent is a small federation. The auditor’s annexure lists eleven subsidiaries consolidated into the June 2026 quarter — Vikas Publishing House, Chhaya Prakashani, New Saraswati House, Safari Digital, BPI (India), Edutor Technologies, S. Chand Edutech, Indian Progressive Publishing, Convergia Digital, Shri Shyamlal Printing Press, and, newest, CPD Singapore Education Services, effective 29 January 2026. Nine of those were reviewed by other auditors, together carrying ₹53.02 crore of quarterly revenue and a ₹2.53 crore net loss.
The recent corporate moves come in a cluster. In October 2025, Vikas Publishing hived off its printing business by slump sale to Shri Shyamlal Printing Press for ₹53 crore — cash plus CCDs, a group reshuffle in which the printing press changed rooms without leaving the house. In January 2026, New Saraswati House acquired 100% of CPD Singapore for SGD 1.5 million, disclosed 30 January. In March 2025, the residual 49% of BPI was bought in, making it wholly owned. And in November 2025, ICRA upgraded the rating on ₹110 crore of facilities to [ICRA]A (Stable) from [ICRA]A- (Stable).
The auditors, Walker Chandiok & Co LLP, issued unmodified opinions on both the standalone and consolidated June quarter results.
US
Now live
US Stocks terminal is live
13,000+ US tickers · EDGAR fundamentals · screener and filings feed — the same terminal, for American markets.
Explore →
3. Business Model: WTF Do They Even Do?
They print the books your childhood was measured in, and then they sell the same words again in a format your childhood could not have imagined.
The core is K-12 — schoolbooks for CBSE, ICSE and West Bengal State Board schools, per ICRA, sold under the brands S Chand, Madhubun, Saraswati, Chhaya and IPP. Around that sit Higher Education (S Chand, Vikas brands, covering test prep and college titles) and Early Learning. Digital platforms carry names that sound like a very optimistic startup incubator all at once — Destination Success, Intellitab, Mystudygear, Ignitor, Flipclass.
The scale figures from the investor update: 14,000+ unique titles, 4,000+ channel partners, 3,000+ authors, 45,000+ schools covered, and a team of 2,000+. Three thousand authors is not a contributor list, it is a mid-sized town, all of whom presumably want their royalty statements on time.
Then there is the machinery of getting a book from a printing press into a fourteen-year-old’s bag. The company has a 90 TPD print capacity, in-house printing share at 82.5%, and a new printing and binding facility that management describes as half completed this year with full completion next year, with some binding and printing work shifting across from Sep–Oct. Paper, per ICRA, is 30–40% of operating income — a business where the single biggest input cost is a commodity, and the single biggest revenue driver is a government syllabus committee.
The newest line item is the strangest and the most 2026: content licensing, described as AI datasets. The Screener insights table tracks the client count going 2, 5, 7. Eighty-seven years of building a text library, and the library has now started renting itself out to models that will read every page in an afternoon and never once complain about the syllabus.
Beyond that sit two minority holdings: Smartivity (~16%, angel funding of about ₹2 crore, valued at approximately ₹23 crore at the last secondary transaction, FY26 revenues above ₹75 crore) and ixamBee
