Private education giant building three new ‘university’ campuses in South Africa is raking in the cash

Advtech expects to report significantly higher earnings for the first half of its 2026 financial year, as the private education giant continues to go from strength to strength.

This comes at a time of heavy investment for the company, which is constructing two new mega campuses in Sandton and Nelson Mandela Bay, with plans to build another in Durban.

On Tuesday, 11 August, Advtech, Africa’s largest private education provider, informed shareholders of its prospective earnings for the six months ended 30 June 2026.

The company said its earnings are expected to be between 13% and 18% higher compared to the six months through June 2025.

This applies to Advtech’s basic normalised earnings per share (NEPS), basic headline earnings per share, and basic earnings per share.

Advtech explained that it reports NEPS to exclude the effects of one-off transactions and corporate action costs from its results.

This earnings surge comes as Advtech is significantly expanding its physical footprint in South Africa.

Currently, Advtech operates through brands such as Crawford, Trinityhouse, Vega, and Varsity College, each with its own school network. 

However, over the past year, Advtech has been hard at work completing the construction of two mega campuses in Sandton and Nelson Mandela Bay.

The Sandton campus houses Advtech subsidiary the Independent Institute of Education’s (IIE) Varsity College Sandton and IIE-Vega School Johannesburg. It was opened in February 2026.

It has a capacity of 9,000 students and cost R420 million to develop. Eventually, the campus will be able to support up to 13,000 students.

Advtech also opened its new Nelson Mandela Bay campus in Gqeberha, Eastern Cape, in February 2026.

The new building was a relocation of the company’s existing campus in Nelson Mandela Bay, and can accommodate 5,000 students.

It features a modern information centre and an indoor sports facility designed to support both academic excellence and holistic student development.

However, the expansion of Advtech’s physical footprint in South Africa does not stop there, with the company also having unveiled plans for a similar campus in Durban.

The company announced earlier in 2026 that it had secured 10 hectares of land in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, for the development of a new university mega-campus.

The campus’s construction is set to commence in 2027, with phase one scheduled to open in 2029. The initial build will accommodate 8,000 students and include a purpose-built 500-bed student residence.

The second phase of construction, which is set to be completed in 2035, will expand capacity to 10,500 students, with accommodation increasing by a further 500 beds.

More plans for this campus will likely be shared in Advtech’s results for the six months ended 30 June 2026, which are set to be released on Monday, 24 August 2026.