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In April 2009, Perdigão was contemplating the acquisition of Sadia and a merger of the two companies. The intended share-swap transaction between two of Brazil’s biggest food companies would allow Perdigão to dramatically grow its domestic and international market share, and become one of the world’s largest players in the food production industry, while driving up profit margins by benefiting from synergies. However, Sadia had very significant short and long debt that it was unlikely to be able to service. Students must determine whether Perdigão should acquire Sadia and the basis of the proposed share exchange, and assess whether the resulting debt burden of the combined companies is manageable.

Nordea Bank had emerged as the largest financial group in the Nordic region. As part of its consolidated approach, Nordea’s top management had made the strategic decision to outsource a number of the company’s peripheral activities, such as catering, security, and cleaning, in order to focus on the core business of banking. In Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, some services had been outsourced to one of the leaders in the facility management (FM) market, the global service provider ISS. The relationship between Nordea and ISS on the delivery of facility services had a long history, but a new contract was successfully concluded by the end of 2010. Consequently, ISS was chosen as Nordea’s FM partner and would continually be providing Nordea with a scope of supportive services across 20 locations in the Nordic region. From 2010 and onwards, a significant switch was made to an output-based focus in the contract, where it was the quality of the delivered services that was specified rather than how to achieve this level of quality, i.e. the input. The change to an output-based contract was seen as a new beginning of a relationship that required significant changes on both sides in terms of mentality, organization, governance structures, and adjustments of expectations. Both the view of the customer (Nordea) and the supplier (ISS) are presented and contrasted in the case.

In 2012, a stock analyst was preparing a recommendation on what his firm, a large U.S. investment house, should do with its stake in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, was trying to recover from a series of missteps that had seen competitors such as dollar stores and Amazon.com close the performance gap. Competitors had copied many aspects of Wal-Mart’s distribution system, including cross-docking products, eliminating storage time in warehouses, positioning stores around distribution centres, and widespread adoption of electronic data interchange (EDI), as well as ordering and shipping from suppliers.

The degradation of the environment has led many governments and customers to pressure businesses to make their operations more environmentally friendly. The case illustrates an effective example of corporate social responsibility. Specifically, it demonstrates how a small increase in a supply chain budget can drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation of LCD TVs from their manufacturing bases to a distribution centre.

The case focuses on HTT, a small Canadian automotive manufacturer working in the highly specialized niche of supercars. HTT was only three months away from finishing the design stage of its vehicle, the Pléthore, and had to make decisions regarding the production stage. Among them, the company needed to decide how it would support its value chain processes with information technology (IT). However, a detailed set of requirements for an IT system could not be elicited until the company had successfully produced and distributed at least a few vehicles. In the meantime, the CEO, who was also a shareholder, wanted to develop a shortlist of potential IT products that would give him a better grasp of the available options.

This case examines how CARE, a non-profit international development organization, begins to pursue a market-based approach to meeting its poverty-reduction mission. Specifically, a CARE project manager explores how previous work with low-income livestock herders in drought-prone eastern Kenya might offer an opportunity to work with value chain actors to improve access to markets and increase farmers’ incomes.<br><br>With the Kenyan livestock project as the pilot for this new approach, Case (A)’s main decision point concerns a strategic choice on what role CARE should play in the value chain to support low-income pastoralists. Options include 1) becoming directly involved in value chain transactions, buying and selling livestock, and providing inputs to farmers or 2) acting as a value chain facilitator to provide the information and incentives to existing actors to make the value chain more efficient and inclusive for low-income producers. This strategic decision is part of a larger proposal that students are tasked to create for CARE’s market-based livestock project.

This case is a supplement to Value Chain Development: Care Kenya’s Challenge to Make Markets Work for the Poor (A).

The president and chief executive officer of Prelko, a firm that, among other services, provides personalized printing for large companies, must decide if a new printing software application from Europe is appropriate for use by the company. The company’s printing business has been in decline and the president must determine whether the company should cease offering printing services entirely to its customers, or if there is a profitable way to reinvigorate the printing line of the business.

The case traces the milestones of a 26-year history of a social entrepreneur creating a social enterprise, Madras Craft Foundation (MCF). The story leads up to a three-decade retrospective on the role social ventures play in our lives. Based on the entrepreneur’s critical reflection, the case shows how the paths of the social entrepreneur and the social enterprise became closely interwoven. After MCF had been self-sufficient for three years, the success of the social venture precipitated a crisis as to who could succeed the founding social entrepreneur, whose love for South India’s arts, crafts, and culture had become inseparable from MCF and its best-known offering, Dakshina Chitra. The case details MCF’s revenue-generation model and shows the interdependence between the social entrepreneur and the social enterprise — their “co-becoming” over almost three decades. The analysis makes apparent links between the founder and her venture, and challenges the divide between social entrepreneur and social enterprise. It also provides an opportunity to discuss what is alike or different in social entrepreneurship and traditional entrepreneurship.

The director of new business development and strategy at Redmas Digital, an enterprising start-up, needs to write two sales e-mail templates for Redmas’s newest pet project, YouPostIt! One of the e-mails is for leads that the company has not done business with before (cold leads) and the other is for leads that the company has done business with before (warm leads). The director has to write concise e-mails with high “skim value.” He must distill a large amount of information regarding the company value proposition and company history in an engaging way. <br><br>YouPostIt! is an experimental marketing company owned by Redmas Digital. The concept is simple: consumers get a chance to send physical postcards for free. Consumers log in at YouPostIt.com, upload a photo and write a short note, and then choose a border to go around the picture on the postcard (the border is a corporate logo). The business that occupies the border of the postcard assumes the cost of the postcard. Businesses have the opportunity to include coupons on the physical postcard and via an e-mail notification message after sending. How can the director write these sales e-mails to businesses he believes will want to pay for consumers’ postcards?

Instructor spreadsheet for teaching note product 8B12E003.

Spreadsheet for product 9B12E003.

The president of Image Pipeline Services, a pipeline flushing and inspection firm, is taking a step back from the past few weeks, where he has spent virtually all his waking time working on his new business in Edmonton’s oil sands industry. A few months after starting his business, he controls virtually the entire market, but competitors will be encroaching soon. One competitor has offered to purchase his business and the president wants to weigh his options before agreeing to sell or continuing to compete.

PRIDE Industries made a $2.6 million capital appropriation request to replace older electronics surface mount technology with newer and more capable machinery. PRIDE, a non-profit enterprise that hired workers with disabilities, wished to earn business and reputation based on the universal measures used by customers worldwide — price, quality and delivery — while maintaining its social mission. The proposal looked good on paper, and the company predicted that it was the only way to keep PRIDE’s current electronic manufacturing services customers happy as well as capture new business. One of the other important pieces of the capital expenditure analysis was to study trends in the manufacturing sector, especially evidence that manufacturing was returning to the United States from offshore. Yet, the investment represented a risk for PRIDE if the projected new business opportunities did not materialize.

Simbhaoli Sugars Limited has deployed a new system of communication services through Voice Web, a mobile-based Internet technology, in rural areas for better engagement with the farmers who supply sugarcane to the SSL factory. The importance of perceived value of services to the end-users and the need to involve all stakeholders during the innovation set-up process are explained. Critical aspects of the service innovation concept are used to analyse the issues observed during the pilot deployment of Simbhaoli Sugars Limited’s new communication services.

This case presents a trading situation arising out of the acquisition of Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited, an Indian pharmaceutical firm, by Daiichi Sankyo, Inc., a Japanese pharmaceutical firm, in 2008. After buying out the Ranbaxy’s founding family’s stake in the company, Daiichi Sankyo made a partial tender offer bid for the remaining shares of Ranbaxy. The uncertainty as to whether or not the deal would go through and what the eventual acceptance rate would be resulted in a special situation investment opportunity. In the case, a risk arbitrageur needs to evaluate this potential opportunity and determine an appropriate trading strategy. Key decisions include whether to buy or sell the target stock and when to implement this purchase or sale. In this way, the case presents an unfolding situation augmented with a rich set of relevant secondary data such as news and stock prices, so that students are exposed to a real trading situation. The case requires students to understand market mechanisms and perform detailed analyses to justify their decisions.

Instructor spreadsheets for product 8B12N022.

Student spreadsheets for product 9B12N022.

Student spreadsheet for product 9B12E009.

This case builds upon Bank Vozrozhdeniye (V.Bank) (A) and (B), bringing the subject up to the year 2012. The (C) case again encourages students to balance economic and political risks against the likely increase in future profitability.