個案總覽

This case talks about the 3P (People Planet Profit) strategies of Ant Group backed MYbank, which was established as an online bank in China, as part of Alibaba's ecosystem, with the vision of providing inclusive finance services to SMEs and farmers in rural China. In April 2022, however, the Chinese economy was grappling with the after effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and macro-economic trends had predicted slower growth for the year. The aggregate net profit of China's commercial banks was expected to grow at around 10% in 2022, compared to 12.6% in 2021. However, despite the challenges, there was optimism at MYbank as the company had reported a year-on-year growth of 31.6% for the first quarter of 2022, with loans and advances for the first quarter totalling a staggering US$ 27 billion. Banking had traditionally always paid more attention to high-net-worth individuals, fewer accounts and more one-on-one relationships. MYbank however, had focussed on technology, innovation, quick transactions, large volume of low-income consumers, and lower operational costs to create a sustainable business model. However, ripple effects of the pandemic were plaguing its target customer segment - SMEs and farmers from low-income backgrounds in rural China - who were grappling with economic uncertainties. Could MYbank continue to adopt a low margin, high volume model like assembly line businesses to target large swathes of the rural population and generate profit in the process? Could MYbank become the McDonald's of digital banking in China?

Legal decisions made at the state and federal levels on controversial social policies have a direct impact on business, particularly when such rulings conflict with stakeholder values. The authors provide examples that illustrate why companies need to be prepared to respond strategically to sudden public policy changes and political upheavals, and offer five principles to help leaders plan a course of action.

This exercise aims to teach students about 1) Targeting Policies; and 2) Algorithmic decision making, and 3) Retention management.

This case describes the efforts of City Football Group (CFG) to purchase Esporte Clube Bahia (Bahia), a Brazilian professional soccer club. CFG's strategy was to acquire under-performing clubs worldwide, invest money in high-profile players, and improve the teams' performances. The company also aimed to develop young players on its lower-tier teams and then funnel them to Manchester City, its highest-performing team, once they matured. CFG instructed the teams to follow a similar style of play and, in some cases, changed teams' jerseys and names to conform to CFG's brand. Purchasing Bahia presented the opportunity to gain a foothold in Brazilian soccer, an under-monetized market poised for rapid growth. Yet Bahia was a mid-tier team with no star players. It was also unclear whether Bahia's fans and players would meld with CFG's culture and expectations. At the conclusion of the case, CFG CEO Ferran Soriano discovers that the price for Bahia is significantly higher than reports had initially indicated. Is the club worth the price?

Spreadsheet Supplement for Technical Note UV7169

The case focuses on the transformation of OCP, a state-owned monopoly that mined and exploited Morocco's phosphate reserves. By 2021 it had become an organization with a mission to contribute to the sustainability of food security as the custodians of 70% of the world's phosphate reserves. Phosphate is one of three vital ingredients in fertilizers that are used to grow healthy, drought-resistant plants, and contributes to sustainable agriculture. This is nowhere more urgent than in Africa: sub-Saharan Africa has the world's fastest-growing population, but an impoverished agricultural system and only one-third of its arable land is cultivated. Helping smallholder farmers to cultivate more land with robust crops could improve the continent's sustainable agriculture and better feed its population. In 2016 OCP Group's Chairman, Dr Mostafa Terrab, launched "the Movement," a vaguely defined initiative to "liberate energy" and develop collective intelligence to build a more purposeful sustainable future. The Movement's goal was to continue the group's transformation from a hierarchical phosphate producer to a global, digital and learning organization with a mission to create sustainable growth for everyone. The case describes the Movement's philosophy, intention and principles: self-organization, an advice process, and collective intelligence based on a shared vision that all people can contribute to the organization and its ecosystem through collaboration. The Movement brings people together to anticipate future challenges and stakeholder expectations and to bring innovative ideas to life. By 2019, the Movement had launched 60 projects involving 9,000 people that have diversified the group's business activities, enhanced the employee experience, created growth opportunities and community engagement in Morocco and across Africa. Several of these projects have been anchored into the Group and have increased its focus on inclusive business and sustainable development.

This case focuses on the customer loyalty program of Qutoutiao Inc. (QTT, NASDAQ: QTT). Financial analysis, unit economics, and accounting treatments will be explored in the case. QTT operated a mobile content platform, "Qutoutiao," in China, which literally meant "fun headlines" in Chinese. QTT aggregated mobile content from various sources and used AI-based algorithms to present customized content to users. The data analytics capabilities of the algorithms enabled QTT to analyze user data and customize feeds to users in order to generate more advertising revenue. In December 2019, Wolfpack Research (Wolfpack) published a report on QTT, casting serious doubts about the sustainability of its business model, in particular, the customer loyalty program. The program comprised "user engagement" and "user acquisition" activities that were found to be "extremely expensive." Days later, Wolfpack published a follow-up report extensively using unit economics to support its claims. Students will be asked to apply unit economics to analyzing QTT's operating and financial data. For financial analysis and forensic accounting purposes, students will also grapple with questions on how to substantiate the loyalty program expenses and liabilities, and to assess the financial implications of QTT's accounting treatment in recording the loyalty program expenses.

Spreadsheet Supplement for Case HK1397

Corporate transparency is an aspirational ideal that is very difficult to achieve because organizations can never be completely transparent. As a result, effective management of transparency requires managers to carefully balance transparency with the need for secrecy. This article describes the complex nature of transparency and demonstrates how attempts to balance transparency with secrecy result in three different kinds of transparency - rationalized, ceremonial, and decontextualized. Effective transparency management requires managers to avoid simply dumping information, use new technology strategically, engage their audiences creatively, avoid overpromising and underdelivering, and attend carefully to how transparency is measured.

Many companies are implementing transparency initiatives to improve environmental and social impacts throughout their supply chains. Meaningful change, however, is elusive, and transparency efforts are often criticized as legitimizing mechanisms or "window-dressing." This article introduces a model of transformational transparency that enables new insights to drive radical change in companies and supply chains, as well as in industries and society at large. The model highlights the need for technological investments grounded in improving data, empowering stakeholders, and applying moral leadership. It presents examples that demonstrate how the model allows companies to foster dramatic improvements in social and environmental impacts.

Calibrating environmental impacts and dependencies in financial metrics, known as natural capital accounting (natural capital valuations; assessments), is critical for transparency and effective decision-making. Understanding the financial impact of a firm's effects and dependencies on nature not only surfaces new priorities and insights, but also informs and encourages companies' efforts to protect natural resources. Given that transparency and accountability go hand-in-hand, natural capital valuations help companies mitigate impacts and dependencies on the natural world.

One of the most iconic American companies, General Electric (GE) was founded in 1892 in New York state. Named among the original dozen companies on the Dow Jones index in 1896, it was the list's most tenacious holdout, maintaining its "blue chip" stock status for over one hundred years. Throughout its history, GE survived, indeed initiated, revolutions across industries, technologies, and managerial practices. By the time award-winning "Manager of the Century" Jack Welch retired from his position as CEO in 2001, GE's market capitalization was over $410 billion. That peak was never surpassed, and the subsequent decline tested company leadership. Welch's hand-picked successor CEO Jeffrey Immelt oversaw GE's near-bankruptcy in 2008 and warranted SEC penalties for misleading investors between 2015 and 2017. Media critiqued his replacement, John Flannery, for lacking urgency as he slashed the company's once-coveted dividend in half. In October 2018, H. Lawrence Culp became the first outsider CEO in the company's history after another Board intervention. With a changing landscape that had rendered Welch's handbook outdated and recent leadership that had been heavily criticized, Larry Culp faced looming strategic challenges. Would Culp's financial, managerial, and structural transformation empower long-term value creation?

In 2018, Francisco Staton, Managing Director of Arcos Dorados in Colombia had to decide on the company's strategy to expand its food ordering and delivery business in the country. Arcos Dorados stood as McDonald's largest independent franchisee, and Colombia was one of the 20 markets and territories in Latin America and the Caribbean where the company operated. Arcos Dorados had analyzed the conditions under which the company would offer delivery services at its restaurants, following the announcement of agreement entered into by McDonald's corporation for offering delivery globally through a last-mile delivery company. As there were local limitations not addressed by the global agreement, Arcos Dorados' Colombia's management team were considering two potential alternatives that could help to address them. The first alternative hinged on stepping up the company's efforts to consolidate its own delivery service. With the second alternative, the company would pursue partnering with last-mile delivery platforms under more favorable conditions than the ones agreed upon by the global agreement. What would be the best alternative to move forward?

In 2020, Francisco Staton, president of Arcos Dorados' Caribbean Division, and Héctor Orozco, Managing Director of Arcos Dorados Colombia, were looking into Arcos Dorados' options to consolidate its food delivery service in Colombia. This time the matter at hand hinged on signing an exclusivity agreement with a startup that had recently moved into Colombia's market.

Many companies were unprepared for the supply chain disruptions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, even though the threat of a global pandemic had been well known for nearly 20 years. Companies need a new mindset to prepare for the inevitable black swan triggers of the next supply disruption. The ADDAPT Framework features six capabilities anticipate, detect, diagnose, activate, protect, and track to better manage for such disruptions and maintain product flow from suppliers to customers.

This case tells the story of Bas Fransen, who evolved from a senior executive at Fortune Global 500 companies to founder of EcoMatcher - a socially responsible enterprise planting trees for planet and profit. This story has two particularly interesting themes. This case focuses upon the human side of the story: how a corporate baron overcame the skepticism of his friends and colleagues, giving up his economic perks and social status to find a more meaningful career as a social entrepreneur. Its companion case (EcoMatcher: Beyond the Triple Bottom Line, USTXXX) focuses upon the end result: EcoMatcher as a truly socially responsible enterprise with a profitable and scalable business model.

This case tells the story of EcoMatcher - a green and socially responsible enterprise that has found a scalable and profitable business model planting trees. EcoMatcher is interesting partly as an excellent example of strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR); its core profit-making activity of planting trees is intrinsically good for the planet and its people. This differs from the triple bottom line approach employed by some other companies, which use green or prosocial activities to offset core profit-making activities that may harm society or the environment. Both strategic CSR and the triple bottom line approach can underlie improvements in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting. This case focuses on EcoMatcher as an exemplar of strategic CSR while a companion case (EcoMatcher: Daring to Make a Difference, USTXXX) focuses on how EcoMatcher's founder made the difficult leap from corporate executive to social entrepreneur, trading off power, status, and wealth for more meaning in his work.

Mid-2015, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the Near East sought asylum in the European Union. At the spike of the influx, over 4,000 asylum seekers, most from war-torn Syria, were landing in the Netherlands each week. The Dutch Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers was overwhelmed: it had to create dozens of reception centers from scratch, sometimes within just 48 hours, and sought to provide beds to all those entering. Anthony Slinkert, one of the agency's regional managers, was charged with finding locations for new centers in the eastern part of the country. His work on the ground was directly impacted by tense political debates in the European Union, in national and local governments, as well as by the ongoing debates in media and in towns across his region, since the arrival of the asylum seeker evoked unrest in local communities- exactly where Slinkert had to carry out his job.

On April 14, 2022, Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter Inc. for US$54.20 per share, for a total cost of US$44 billion. Musk hoped to make the social media network a platform of free speech, and the company profitable and cash flow-positive far more quickly than its management team at the time. Musk's leveraged buyout was mainly funded by a margin loan backed by his own shares in his company, Tesla Inc. On July 8, 2022, Musk announced that he was backing out of the deal. Almost immediately, a lawsuit was filed to force Musk to close the deal as required by the merger agreement. In response, Musk had to decide whether his bid of US$54.20 per share was still a fair valuation for the purchase, if a leveraged buyout with a margin loan was the best financing plan, and whether to confirm or abandon his agreement to buy Twitter Inc. If he chose to walk away from the deal, he would have to consider the potential loss, depending on the outcome of the pending lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery.

Spreadsheet Supplement for Case W30166