This note explains the rationale and derivation behind "return bridge," a key analytical tool used in the private equity industry to understand sources of value-add. The note elaborates on the advantages and the shortcomings of the return bridge.
Apex Ski Boots has introduced a new ski boot that, due to its radical design, is meeting resistance in the marketplace from many retailers, ski experts, and consumers. The company must decide how best to drive sales in the face of this resistance.
Launched as a private brand in 1980 to counter the increasingly brand-conscious consumer in Japan, MUJI offered beautifully designed, fairly priced, no-frills quality goods. The once modest private label brand with 40 products had expanded significantly by 2019 to more than 7,000 products with more than half its 975 stores outside its home market in Japan. It had even expanded into the service industry, opening hotels. President Matsuzaki of Ryohin Keikaku, MUJI's operating company, was charged with reorganizing the product portfolio and prioritizing new initiatives, tasks complicated by the absence of a clear definition of "MUJI-ness," the meaning of which had always been intentionally left open.
This case features Monica Issar, then Global Head of J.P. Morgan Endowments & Foundations Group in the Private Bank. In just five years, she and J.P. Morgan have grown the Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO) business from $5 billion in AUM from primarily family foundations to $30 billion AUM of institutional capital. Increasingly, clients are requesting guidelines that reflect not only their risk and return preferences, but also their social or environmental preferences. Monica Issar contemplates a variety of strategic questions around how best to engage clients and their needs moving forward on these non-traditional financial dimensions while balancing the bank's fiduciary role.
In 2018, AB InBev faced a difficult decision: whether to keep its $8 billion dividend program or cut dividends either partially or in full. This case facilitates a theoretical discussion and practical application of dividend policies and their role in value creation for firm stakeholders. Students gain experience formulating a dividend policy and understanding its effects on debt, cost of capital, and company valuation. A widely recognized global leader of the beer industry, AB InBev had built a global presence and a broad brand portfolio through carefully selected mergers and acquisitions of brewers, from small local craft breweries to large multinationals. 2016 marked the epitome of AB InBev's success-the company had successfully completed the acquisition of SABMiller. This $104 billion merger was enabled by the largest corporate bond offering to date-$61.9 billion. But in October 2018, the financing side of this landmark deal had become the pain point for the company's management. Unexpectedly deteriorating economic conditions in Latin America, fluctuations in commodity prices, and changing consumer tastes slowed the growth in the company's EBITDA, undermining its ability to delever. The company's persistently high debt levels became the talk of the town, and the corporate treasury team was certain that leverage would have to be brought down to move AB InBev's price in a positive direction. But what sounded very simple was not an easy feat. Cutting dividends was one of the avenues AB InBev could pursue, but was it the best one? This case has been successfully taught at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in the Financial Policy module of ""Financial Management and Policies,"" a course in the first-year MBA core curriculum.
CavinKare Private Limited (CavinKare), a FMCG company was founded by Chinni Krishnan Ranganathan (CKR) in 1998. With the rapid growth of the organization, the spirit of entrepreneurship had given way to bureaucratic functioning. In 2012, CKR undertook a series of human capital interventions aimed at rejuvenating the organization and at aligning performance goals at different levels to the larger organizational strategy, bringing in the right people, providing them the right resources to succeed, and creating the right incentives for performance excellence. New systems and processes were introduced for employee selection, setting clear performance expectations, review & assessment, training & development, compensation and rewards & recognition. The changes enhanced CavinKare's growth and the company registered a double-digit growth while the industry average hovered around 4-5%. Though the company had effectively implemented a range of human capital systems and processes, CKR believed that the culture and mindsets still lagged. There was a need to ensure that the cultural fabric had to be aligned to the intent of creating performance excellence by being entrepreneurial, innovative and learning-oriented. CKR wondered how to address this unfinished agenda of building human capital.
In 2015, Mauricio Macri became President of Argentina and declared solving the energy crisis one of his top priorities. When Macri attempted to raise utility tariffs, however, he faced loud protests from citizens. In search of solutions to growing shortages, the government seized on Argentina's still largely untapped, but potentially vast renewable energy sector and created an ambitious program called RenovAr (renew in Spanish). By 2016, the country's share of renewable energy stood at less than 2 percent of the power mix. RenovAr's goal was to raise that percentage to 20 percent by 2025. An ambitious plan for an economy still reeling from the 2001 default. This case describes the business friendly Macri administration's strategy to attract private investment in the nascent renewable energy sector, under challenging macroeconomic conditions. Sequel is forthcoming.
In 2017, Disney announced that in 2019 it would launch Disney Plus, a subscription-based streaming video service that promised to rival Netflix, the dominant player in the market. This was the latest advancement in the history of movie rentals, which had first exploded in the 1980s with the advent of videotape and had gone through several technological transformations before reaching the age of streaming in the 2010s. At the time of Disney's announcement, Netflix dominated the market due to its ever-improving algorithmic recommendation system and its investment in original content. How would Netflix withstand the competition from Disney? What would be an appropriate measure of relative strength for a streaming service? This case offers a way in to discussions of customer lifetime value, market capitalization, and discounted cash flows, as well as the role of technological change in business models and firm valuation techniques.
Netflix Top Picks, Amazon recommendations, the iTunes Genius button. They all have one thing in common: they are driven by clever algorithms that use a technique known as collaborative filtering. Often used in machine learning operations, collaborative filtering is the process by which a firm like Netflix generates predictions about a single user's preferences using data taken from a large number of users. This technical note offers an overview of three of the main collaborative filtering methods: slope one, a purely predictive nonparametric model; ordinal logit, a parametric regression model; and alternative least squares, a matrix factorization technique.
Regulus Solar Power Inc., headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, had continued to experience financial growth over the past decade, thanks in large measure to the environmental movement and declining solar panel prices. The expansion of renewable resources was one of the lynchpins of the environmental movement sweeping the United States. Since its founding in 2010, Regulus Solar Power Inc. had focused on installing solar powered systems throughout the Southwest United States, primarily on residential and commercial applications. By 2018, however, revenues had gone flat due in largely to the rapid expansion of the largest solar panel installer in the United States into Regulus Solar Power Inc.'s traditional marketplace. The company's management team wished to examine the impact of lowering prices on revenues and assess the opportunities for more fully engaging environmental movement groups.
Maryland-based Nexercise App Inc.'s fitness application (app) Sworkit provided app-based workout routines that required no equipment. In October 2017, the app was available in a free version with advertising, or via subscriptions that included additional features and no advertising-a classic example of freemium pricing. While 1.5 million people made use of Sworkit each month, the large majority of these were free users, and only a small portion converted to paid subscriptions. The Sworkit leadership team faced several challenges related to their reliance on advertising revenue, including unpredictability and low value per customer; this led them to re-evaluate their pricing model. Would eliminating or reducing Sworkit's free access better enable management to capture value from the popular app?
In February 2018, the dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of the East Coast in eastern Canada was faced with the challenge of managing a protest by one of his professors. Tension had been brewing between the two for a few months because of inappropriate expense claims and complaints of sexual harassment. However, because of the way the dean had been appointed, he was in a weak position and could not depend on his superiors for help in solving the problem. As a result, donors were complaining, prospective students were changing their minds about applying, and department chairs were beginning to complain. The dean wondered what he should do to bring his faculty back to a normal functioning state. What should he do about the protesting professor, the apparent fraud, and the reactions of potential employers, potential students, and donors? How could he improve the image of his faculty and the university?
Founded in 2005, Zillow had become the leading online real estate and home-related marketplace. The brand was recognized as a trusted resource for players in the real estate market, providing information and transparency on home prices. Revenue, which was historically derived primarily from advertising fees paid by realtors and mortgage lenders, totaled $1.3 billion in 2018. This was in the process of changing, however. The company had entered the direct home buying and selling market in 2017. To Zillow, the move was a logical extension of its business model. Research showed that there was pent up desire to sell homes, but that sellers disliked the conventional process. Zillow Offers made home selling easy and fast - for sellers of homes that met certain criteria, Zillow Offers made an offer within 48 hours of the seller submitting a request for an offer online. Zillow Offers provided sellers a fair price and a guaranteed cash close, then performed renovations and hoped to sell the home within a target of 90 days, although actual times varied by market. The company's stock was more volatile in the period since launching Zillow Offers and some industry observers wondered if it was in part due to the market's perception of the risks associated with the new business. CEO Rich Barton believed the "instant buyer" or iBuyer market could one day account for up to 30% of all domestic real estate transactions and that Zillow Offers could bring in an additional $20 billion in annual revenue within three to five years. But there remained work to be done to improve transaction metrics, fend off competition from well-funded startups and incumbent realtors, and convince shareholders of the attractiveness of the new businesses.
As he seeks to place the division he leads on a firm footing for the future, Tom Staggs, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, is considering a range of investments designed to either upgrade the guest experience in the company's existing parks or to expand access to "the Disney magic" beyond the company's current efforts. The case invites students to reflect on the "job to be done" that the parks perform for their guests, as well as on how far Disney can go to accommodate those for whom the parks are out of reach while still maintaining a premium experience.
In July 2019, Allstate, the United States' number-three property and casualty (P/C) insurer, released its second-quarter earnings, which reported first-half revenues of $22.1 billion, up 11.4% year-over-year. Shareholders cheered the top-line growth, but, P/C premiums had only grown 6.2%, considerably lower than Allstate's top competitors, GEICO and Progressive. Indeed, since the beginning of the global financial crisis, Allstate had grown net premiums earned by just 2.1% per year, compared to 7.6% at Progressive and 9.9% at GEICO. As a result, Allstate had fallen from the number-two writer of private passenger auto insurance to number four, losing market share each year. There was, however, some sign that Allstate was returning to faster growth, with net premiums earned up 5.3% in 2018. During this period, CEO Thomas Wilson had taken steps to reignite growth, concerned primarily with building Allstate's direct-sales business, expanding its range of usage-based products and telematics solutions, and focusing more on insuring smaller consumer devices. Still, growth remained laggard, despite high-profile acquisitions of the direct online specialist Esurance in October 2011 and SquareTrade, a provider of extended warranty contracts for consumer devices, in November 2016. Nothing seemed to ward off challenges from GEICO and Progressive. Meanwhile, rapid advances in ridesharing and autonomous vehicle technology promised to disrupt the entire auto insurance industry. Allstate was early to recognize this shift and had begun investing heavily in new technologies and partnering with researchers and ridesharing operators to prepare for the coming disruptions. Wilson had also set up a new business unit called Arity that would oversee Allstate's efforts at usage-based telematics and to collect and process data on drivers to improve underwriting models.
Maryland-based Nexercise App Inc.’s fitness application (app) Sworkit provided app-based workout routines that required no equipment. In October 2017, the app was available in a free version with advertising, or via subscriptions that included additional features and no advertising—a classic example of freemium pricing. While 1.5 million people made use of Sworkit each month, the large majority of these were free users, and only a small portion converted to paid subscriptions. The Sworkit leadership team faced several challenges related to their reliance on advertising revenue, including unpredictability and low value per customer; this led them to re-evaluate their pricing model. Would eliminating or reducing Sworkit’s free access better enable management to capture value from the popular app?
In February 2018, the dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of the East Coast in eastern Canada was faced with the challenge of managing a protest by one of his professors. Tension had been brewing between the two for a few months because of inappropriate expense claims and complaints of sexual harassment. However, because of the way the dean had been appointed, he was in a weak position and could not depend on his superiors for help in solving the problem. As a result, donors were complaining, prospective students were changing their minds about applying, and department chairs were beginning to complain. The dean wondered what he should do to bring his faculty back to a normal functioning state. What should he do about the protesting professor, the apparent fraud, and the reactions of potential employers, potential students, and donors? How could he improve the image of his faculty and the university?
The general manager at Gati, a well-known logistics services company in India, was worried about the number of complaints the company had received. The popular supply chain solutions and logistics service provider had introduced a premium express service scheme five months ago and, since then, had 231 complaints concerning the late delivery of goods. This new scheme charged a considerable markup and guaranteed shipment of goods within 72 hours. Being dedicated to ensuring quality, the general manager had to decide whether the process was under control and if the company was operating within tolerable error limits. Could he find a solution to streamline the delivery process and achieve a target defect of 0.0005 per cent? Using MS Excel, statistical techniques were used to unravel the multi-faceted dilemma and help in decision-making.
Regulus Solar Power Inc., headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, had continued to experience financial growth over the past decade, thanks in large measure to the environmental movement and declining solar panel prices. The expansion of renewable resources was one of the lynchpins of the environmental movement sweeping the United States. Since its founding in 2010, Regulus Solar Power Inc. had focused on installing solar powered systems throughout the Southwest United States, primarily on residential and commercial applications. By 2018, however, revenues had gone flat due in largely to the rapid expansion of the largest solar panel installer in the United States into Regulus Solar Power Inc.’s traditional marketplace. The company’s management team wished to examine the impact of lowering prices on revenues and assess the opportunities for more fully engaging environmental movement groups.