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The largest of the five institutions in the coastal city of La Rochelle gathered together in the Excelia Group, the school was founded in 1988 by the local Chamber of Commerce in Industry and became a Grand Ecole in 2005.The previous name of Sup de Co was criticised at the time of the renaming in 2018 as unpronounceable in English and so an obstacle to plans to extend operations nationally and globally, starting with plans for a Paris office from 2019. Around a quarter of the 3,600 Excelia students enrolled in 2018, three-quarters of them in the business school, came from outside France.The group had already expanded from its home city to Niort and Angouleme and in 2016 took over the ESCEM school of business and management based in Tours, Poitiers and Orleans. It has offices in the USA, Russia, China and Morocco, and runs bachelors’ courses in Algiers and Marrakech.It runs 10 specialist MBAs, including hospitality and event management, sports management and luxury marketing. Each runs for two years and is taught in English, while the school incorporates the Institut d’Etudes Francaises which since 1931 has offered courses in French as a foreign language.It shares the CEREGE research lab with the Universities of Poitiers and La Rochelle. Tourism and hospitality, focus for one of the other four schools - of which the most recent is the Digital School opened in 2017 - is regarded as a leading strength along with sustainability, corporate social responsibility and organisational agility.