Vikas Singh has been appointed the new Managing Director of Pearson in India. Prior to this appointment, Singh was heading Higher Education and Test Preparation for Pearson, one of its key verticals. He has around 25 years of experience, and has also worked with organisations like Lakme, Gillette, Hutch and Airtel. Prior to joining Pearson India, he was the MD of Kimberly Clark, heading their Indian operations. He takes over in September 2017 from Deepak Mehrotra, "who is moving on to pursue his interests in other sectors". In a statement, Singh said that Pearson's aim will be to take "world class global products and services from our lines of business and other geographies and bring to India to meet the growing need for high-quality learning resources". Pearson was in the news recently for selling online tutoring provider Tutorvista and e-learning content company Edurite for an undisclosed amount to Byju's Learning, a couple of months ago. Both of these were companies in the online education space that Pearson had acquired: It acquired Tutorvista for over $139.5 million, buying the last remaining 20% in February 2013 for an undisclosed amount; it bought Edurite in 2007. Byju's Learning is, at present, scaling up its operations in India, and has raised $35 million recently from Tencent. It's not clear whether online tutoring will be a focus for Pearson in India, but if it going to be, it certainly doesn't appear so from the statement that the company sent across.
