In 2014, Song Weiping, the founder, chair, and major shareholder of the high-end residential property developer Greentown China Holdings Limited (Greentown), based in Hangzhou, China, had started to consider decreasing his involvement in his company. Without any family to provide an obvious successor, Song had to evaluate different ways to leave the business he founded. The alternatives ranged from selling all or part of his holdings to keeping his shares but having someone else manage the company. If he chose to resign his position as chair and remain as a financial investor, he would have to find a suitable successor to act as chief executive officer. If he chose to sell his interest in the company, what criteria should he use to determine the best buyer or buyers? How much should he sell, and how could he determine a fair price?
In 2016, Chinese football club Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao Football Club (Evergrande), which had recently been crowned the most valuable football club in China by Forbes magazine, with a valuation of US$282 million, simultaneously had a market capitalization in China of over US$3.3 billion. The team had yet to earn a profit, so these valuations raised questions regarding how this team in particular was valued and how sports franchises were valued in general. Many sports teams tended to lose money as they built their talent base, and investors often valued such assets in a way that was similar to the valuation of technology stocks. A football fan who was interested in investing in the Evergrande club was concerned about the high price for its shares. He wondered whether the club was really worth this much money and whether its stock price could continue to rise in future. To answer these questions, he needed to understand how the team was valued.
SF Express Group Co. Ltd. (SF Express) was a leading express delivery and logistics solutions provider in China. In May 2017, SF Express became involved in a dispute with the logistics-tracking platform Cainiao Network Technology (Cainiao), which was controlled by Alibaba Group Holding Limited. SF Express and Cainiao were the two largest players in China’s express delivery market. The dispute, which involved an SF Express–affiliated smart package locker company that declined a data-sharing request from Cainiao, caused SF Express and Cainiao to sever their ties over proprietary data and cybersecurity. This severance caused significant disruption to China’s e-commerce sector. After regulatory intervention, both parties agreed to resume sharing data for the time being and had to negotiate a resolution to their data dispute within 30 days. The chief information officer of SF Express needed to come up with an immediate solution to the dispute as well as a long-term data strategy for SF Express.