Naked Theft

A story in the Fuji Sankei Business i says that G.communication has turned things around and will be back in the black in May.

The writing is on the wall. G.communication's attempts at reviving Nova's corpse have been an unmitigated disaster. The Yukan Fuji writes that Nova is turning out to be a sucking chest wound that threatens to take down the entire G.communication group. As the article points out, G.communication has lost at least ¥1.7 billion since taking over Nova. Here's a translation of the article.

The Mainichi Shimbun has an article looking back on METI's role in Nova's failure. Here's a translation of the article.

This is so good it makes you think it's an April Fool's joke. G.communication is upset that other schools have been poaching their students!

So far, it appears that g.communication has botched the rebirth of Nova. No matter how much lipstick they try and put on it, neo-Nova still looks like a pig. I did a little digging in the forums and came up with a few choice nuggets from ex_sensei that illustrate how bad things are going for g.com. The picture he paints makes the old Nova look good by comparison.

The union was at it again today, hounding g.communication over its refusal to rehire former Nova employees.

After a look at the declining fortunes of the foreign language market, the Yano Research Institute has published a the results of its survey [PDF in Japanese] on the impact Nova's failure had on the foreign language sector in Japan.

In comments in the Nova Instructors Finally Paid blog, a few instructors have noticed that their backpay forms have been sent to the wrong address even after they had sent faxes to the trustees' office. An instructor emailed me to say:

The wheels of justice keep on turning. A class action lawsuit is in the works and the legal counsel representing Nova students (the NOVA higai taisaku Osaka bengodan) appears to be preparing to go after everyone involved with Nova's collapse.

The last time we looked at the numbers in the foreign language school market, they were obviously bad, reflecting the fallout from Nova's money woes.