On January 13th, Ms Wang Fang, Secretary of the CPC Committee of FLTRP Group, Chair of the Board of FLTRP Group and President of FLTRP, held a video meeting with Mr Alexander Broich, Executive Vice President & President International of Cengage Global Business Group and General Manager of National Geographic Learning, conducting comprehensive and in-depth exchanges on the business and strategy of the two sides and the international educational publishing market environment. The two sides unanimously decided to open up new areas of cooperation and push cooperation to a higher level. 

Mr Broich said that COVID-19 had brought severe influence and great challenge to the international publishing industry, and bred new development trends. Online teaching and reading became the new normal. Cengage has taken positive measures to face these challenges, including launching new products and services such as online testing system and vocational education teaching platform, and reaching strategic cooperation with the Ministry of Education of Egypt where they launched English project of primary level and served 7 million primary students in Egypt. On the whole, Cengage has been maintaining a good development momentum.

Mr Broich also stressed that in the face of the changes brought about by the pandemic, Cengage has maintained two "invariants". Firstly, the core value of "bringing the world to classroom and the classroom to life" remains unchanged. Cengage continues to provide teachers and students with all-round teaching products and services; Secondly, the emphasis on Chinese market remains unchanged. Cengage hopes to continue to cultivate Chinese market with important partners such as FLTRP. Mr Broich said that Cengage has rich content resources in the field of vocational education and vocational skills, and is integrating international core skills into the curriculum to improve students' competitiveness to prepare for future employment. In addition, Cengage and FLTRP have jointly published a series of high-quality books in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences on China. Cengage understands the mission and needs of Chinese publishing enterprises to explore overseas markets and introduce China to the world. Cengage is willing to carry out more cooperation with FLTRP in China-themed books and jointly develop international markets with FLTRP. 

Ms Wang Fang reviewed the cooperation between FLTRP and Cengage, and introduced in detail the operation and development of FLTRP and its 14th Five-Year plan. Ms Wang Fang said that although the increasingly complex international environment, the normalization of the pandemic situation, "double reduction" and other factors all posed challenges to the operation of FLTRP, we have successfully completed various tasks in 2021, not only maintained the income growth, but also won a number of national publishing awards such as the first national textbook award. The "double reduction" has caused a certain impact on the business of FLTRP, but in the long run, the brand, content and channel advantages accumulated by FLTRP over the years will play a greater part, and the opportunities far outweigh the challenges. Digitization and internationalization are the two major business development directions of FLTRP during the 14th Five-Year Plan period. The expansion of these two fields is inseparable from the support of international partners. We hope to share the opportunities brought by the innovation of international educational publishing with Cengage.

Ms Wang Fang also said that in addition to the products that have achieved remarkable success in Chinese market, such as New Generation English and Lisheng PM Guided Readers, the two sides need to seize the opportunity to explore new areas of cooperation. Ms Wang Fang proposed four directions for bilateral cooperation: First, China's vocational education policies continue to be favorable which would provide a standardized market environment for the high-quality development of vocational education. Meanwhile the standardization of vocational education teaching materials requires the introduction of high-quality content from overseas. FLTRP's vocational education business sector is growing rapidly with outstanding advantages. Cengage has rich publishing resources in vocational education field. FLTRP hopes to develop cooperation with Cengage in this field; Second, facing the digital trend of educational publishing, FLTRP hopes to learn from Cengage's experience and jointly explore digital cooperation in the Chinese market based on FLTRP’s Unipus platform; Third, FLTRP has a qualified team of China-themed authors and translator resources. FLTRP is willing to expand the cooperation of China-themed books with Cengage to create a large-scale and influential series, and tell China stories to the world; Last but not least, FLTRP would like to explore flexible and diversified forms of cooperation with Cengage such as content and material license in order to integrate Cengage content resources into Chinese localized textbooks and products, so as to better meet the needs of schools, teachers and students in China's educational publishing market. 

Ms Zhang Siying, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of FLTRP, Mr Erik Gundersen, Senior Director of Global Partnerships of National Geographic Learning, Mr Roy Lee, Managing Director & Vice President of Cengage Learning Asia, Mr Michael Cahill, Senior Regional Director of National Geographic Learning of Greater China together with other Cengage senior management and FLTRP colleagues attended the meeting.