TAL Education (TAL) Impressive Q3 Revenue Sent its Stock to New Highs

TAL Education Group. (NYSE:TAL), founded in 2003, offers after-school tutoring for students in kindergarten through high school. It is one of the biggest providers of after-school education in China. The company went public in October 2010 by selling 12 million ADS for total proceeds of $120 million. It expanded its learning center network over the years and currently has more than 990 learning centers across 100 cities.

TAL stock has been on a roller coaster ride since the beginning of 2020. Its share started 2020 trading around $50. The stock touched a low of $44.24 on January 27. The drop came after the company released mixed quarterly results for Q3 and many cities in China started reporting Covid-19 cases. Its shares once again fell in April after TAL confirmed that one of its employees illicitly inflated sales figures of an educational program.

However, the company performed well during the second half of the year. Its stock was trading around $80 in October but fell sharply after the company released its Q2 results. Nevertheless, the stock has gained 50 percent over the past year.

TAL shares hit a new 52-week high of $84.41 in the mid-day trading Thursday after the company reported revenue of $1.119 billion for the three-month period ended November 30. The latest quarterly revenue represents year-over-year growth of 35 percent. Moreover, sales numbers are also above analysts’ average estimate of $1.03 billion. However, adjusted earnings came in at $0.02 per share, missing the consensus forecast of $0.07 per share.

Speaking on the results, CFO Rong Luo said in a statement, “In the third quarter, along with the effective measures China’s government has taken to continuously improve the public health situation and economy, we are pleased to see our tutoring business has also demonstrated on-track performance in this fiscal quarter.”

Meanwhile, total student enrollments in the long-term courses jumped 46.5 percent to nearly 3.4 million students, as compared to about 2.3 million students in the comparable quarter of 2019.

TAL stock jumped about 15 percent on Thursday on a massive volume of over 14 million shares, significantly higher than the daily average volume of about 3.07 million shares.