Fenbi's CEO admits fault as core company insured staff plunges 93%. The civil service exam training boom recedes, forcing a shift from asset-heavy model to low-cost standardized operations.
When the CEO of a leading civil service exam training institution publicly detailed decision-making missteps in an open letter, outside attention can easily be drawn to what appears to be a sincere public relations gesture. But in the business arena, all such reflection and apology is typically underpinned by cold, hard financial restructuring. Cutting the insured headcount of a single core entity by 93 percent within two years is not some strategic fine-tuning; it is a forced organizational amputation performed on the brink of cash flow depletion.
The civil service exam track was once viewed as the last safe harbor in the tutoring industry. In recent years, as the number of exam candidates hit record highs year after year, tens of millions of anxious young people have crowded onto this narrow path. In the conventional understanding, Fenbi, with its massive user base, should have been raking in profits.
However, the enormous registration numbers mask an extremely poor business model in adult vocational education. Unlike the K-12 era, where parents would pay without hesitation for repeated purchases to boost scores, adults have extremely fragile willingness to pay, and civil service exam training is a classic one-shot transaction. Once a candidate passes or gives up entirely, the customer's lifetime value immediately drops to zero.
In its rapid expansion over the past few years, Fenbi precisely misjudged how much value could be extracted from this traffic. To capture lower-tier markets and inflate revenue scale, Fenbi aggressively expanded offline learning centers and a heavy-asset R&D team, attempting to overwhelm competitors with a massive human-wave strategy. This crude expansion gambled on an ever-burning fervor for exam preparation, while ignoring that burdensome offline operating costs were relentlessly eating away at already thin gross margins.
This backlash left striking marks in cold business registration records. Following the corporate trajectory of the entity Beijing Fenbi Blue Sky Technology Co., Ltd. through Tianyancha, the speed of its organizational collapse is staggering. The annual report data disclosed by Tianyancha clearly records this massive rout: For this core business company with registered capital of 10 million yuan, insured headcount plummeted in near free fall from 699 in 2023 to just 47 in 2025.
The disappearance of more than 600 real jobs punctures the illusion of high growth in the civil service exam training industry. This shock-style downsizing is not merely stripping away a few unprofitable peripheral operations; it is a complete liquidation of the heavy-asset model in the face of declining average order values and high fulfillment costs.
Education and training have always been a business heavily dependent on human resources, where quality instructors and large tutoring teams form the foundation of reputation. But under the profit-assessment pressure of the capital markets, when revenue growth can no longer conceal massive payroll costs, Fenbi had no choice but to turn the blade on its once-prized back office. Eliminating full-time staff, heavily relying on cheap part-time grading tutors who do not require social insurance contributions, and replacing high-cost live human interaction with standardized question banks and recorded lectures became the formula for squeezing out profits in this brutal winter.
The lightly phrased "decision-making missteps" in that announcement mask the stumble that training institutions take when trying to replicate internet scale effects. Pouring massive funds into offline network construction and headcount expansion ultimately resulted in razor-thin profit margins or even near losses. When traffic dividends peak and capital stops paying for scale without quality, forcibly crushing a bloated organizational structure and casting out expensive full-time employees becomes the last resort for corporate survival.
The hollow shell of just over 40 insured staff reflects the extremely brutal endgame now facing vocational education. The classic playbook of stacking famous instructors and massive tutoring teams to sell exam anxiety has hit its limit. In an increasingly competitive market, leading players of the future will no longer need hundreds or thousands of employees to sustain a façade of prosperity. What replaces them will be a cold, standardized question bank system and ruthlessly compressed labor costs.
This drastic self-preservation is destined to be only the tip of the iceberg in a merciless shakeout across the entire adult training sector.
