US education grants beckon Pye

BIG LEAGUE: Children's book publisher Wendy Pye is taking her company's multimedia products to the lucrative United States education market.

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Early education publishing empire founder Wendy Pye is chasing a big share of new multibillion-dollar United States federal and state government grants to improve child literacy, capturing the first rights in the world to use her multimedia products on new Texas electronic textbooks.

Texas is offering US$650 million (NZ$902m) of "oil money" to fund initiatives to make sure every child in the state is "21st century literate", Ms Pye told the Global Women Forum 2010 in Auckland this week.

Ms Pye's NZ$100m Auckland business is also targeting New York, Florida and California for sales of its multimedia literacy and maths learning products.

She said the US Federal Government had committed US$3.4 billion to improve teacher performance and lift child literacy standards.

She urged the 150 businesswomen at the forum to write down their dreams, advising that about the only thing they probably could not achieve in their lives was to be president of the United States because they did not have a US passport. Everything else was achievable, the entrepreneur said.

"That's how I built a $100m company and now I'm about to build another $200m company in the US."

Asked to elaborate on her latest US deals after her presentation, the normally garrulous Ms Pye declined because US officials had not given clearance for publicity.

Ms Pye said she started selling her primary school educational books, which include the Sunshine, Funways and Award Interactive brands, from the back of a car in the US. Today she has "a very nice apartment" beside Central Park. Wendy Pye Publishing is the largest deliverer of online education products in the world. The US was one country with 50 separate markets, she said.

There were 37.9 million primary school level children in those markets whose educational needs cost US$308b. A slice of this business was available to private companies because the government in the US did not control education.

"Everything is provided by private companies. In Utah the expenditure per [primary] student is US$3886 and in New York it's US$11,572. Which state do you think we chased?"

In the states of New York and Florida, new early education grants worth US$700m each were being offered.

"The boys I compete against are billion-dollar boys – and they are very boring people, with very, very boring products," Ms Pye said.

- © Fairfax NZ News