Excerpt from ALTO Connect Sept 2009: Member Focus on iAE Global
When iAE Global was founded in Seoul, Korea, in 1992 by O.J. Kim, it was a modest recruitment agency, connecting students with English language schools in Australia and, to a lesser extent, the United States. The company opened its first offshore office soon after that, in Sydney, Australia, as well as a franchise office in Busan, Korea.
Over the last decade, with O.J. Kim still at the helm, iAE has established 35 sales offices in Korea, employing 220 counselor/recruiters, plus 67 branches or joint-venture partner offices with 260 counselor/salespersons in major markets around the world, including China, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. The company also has support and on-shore offices in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Recruiting some 10,000 students a year in Korea alone, iAE Global is by far the biggest language travel company in that country, and, working with some 25,000 students worldwide, it is one of the biggest in the world.
“A lot of the European agents do a lot more in numbers of students,” reports iAE Global Managing Director Mark Lucas, a partner in the company, “but they are very short term, say, two or three weeks in England, Spain, or Malta. Korean students tend to go for a very long time.”
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