The internationalization process of mychild to São Paulo, Brazil

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Due to the constant evolution of technology and the lack of time parents have to spend with their children, parents are more demanding regarding the information offered by school. Additionally, 40% of teachers’ time is spent in documentation processes. Thus, schools constantly and increasingly use new technologies, aiming for new customer relationship models and quality of service, efficacy and efficiency of processes and operations. This is the context in which mychild was founded. mychild is a web-based service focused on private daycares and preschools, providing teachers to communicate with parents in a very personalized, automatized and easy way. In addition to this, mychild also provides other fundamental tools for teacher organization and school administration. Present in Portugal and USA, mychild’s first strategic objective is to launch the platform in the second semester of 2014 in São Paulo, with the vision of becoming “the top 5 of the classroom SaaS solution for private daycares and preschools in São Paulo in the next 5 years”. After environmental context analysis, based on demographic, technologic, economic and educational factors, the São Paulo Municipality was found to be the one with the most potential to invest because of its 2691 private schools for childhood education, high internet access, computers and because of its constantly economic growth. Thus, mychild’s second strategic objective is to acquire 20% of the target market by 2017, which translates to 538 schools in the São Paulo Municipality and around 1,5M€ in revenues. With these objectives in mind, the most efficient way to enter in Brazil is through the establishment of a Brazilian subsidiary in São Paulo with the help of Establish Brazil, a Commercial Representative Company and a partnership with SIEEESP. Also, an implementation and a contingency plan, as well as recommendations were elaborated to support activities, processes and operations. The implementation plan was developed through Marketing Mix analysis, 4M’s methodology, risk analysis and the recommendations were fashioned with the successful internationalization.