State-owned Vietnam Education Publishing House experienced its most profitable year in 2021, earning VND287 billion ($12.3 million) in after-tax profit. The profit was 2.5 times higher than the target set by the Ministry of Education and Training and the highest earnings in the publisher’s history.
In previous years, the publisher’s after-tax profit hovered between VND120-150 billion a year. A recently released business report says the publisher printed more than 164 million textbooks last year, exceeding the annual target by about 40 percent. Its earned total revenues of VND1.8 trillion, over 97 percent of which came from book publishing.
The company had a return on equity (ROE) of 39.9 percent and a return on total assets (ROA) of 17.9 percent. The publisher’s seven subsidiaries also reported profits totaling VND46 billion. Another factor in the improved performance was the increase in textbook prices.
In the 2020-2021 school year, the prices of textbooks were two to four times higher under the new general education program.
The publishing house explained that prices went up because the cost of all four components – the number of books in one set for each grades, the cost of organizing the manuscript, the cost of materials and the cost of marketing – increased significantly.
Textbooks are not currently on the list of items priced by the State, but by enterprises that have to declare their prices to the Ministry of Finance. Publishers are solely responsible by law for the correctness and suitability of their pricing structures.
The education ministry had asked the publisher to review the entire process of compilation, printing and distribution to reduce the prices of textbooks. Following this, a 3-9 percent reduction was made over the original declaration.
