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In August 2010, SKS Microfinance became India’s (and South Asia’s) first publicly traded microfinance institution with a stock exchange listing. A share in the company was offered at INR 985 and it commenced trading at INR 1,036, reaching INR 1,404 within a month. However, that was the extent of the good news as far as the company and its shareholders were concerned. Things began to unravel rapidly. The initial public offering of shares was seen as the initiation of a conflict between the interests of the company’s shareholders and the poor rural borrowers it was expected to serve. Further, the company fired an arguably successful chief executive officer due to “inter-personal issues” within days from the end of the post-listing 40-day silent period. Matters were aggravated when 30 women who happened to be microfinance borrowers committed suicide within a span of 45 days, 13 of whom were reported to have been SKS members. The provincial government in the state of Andhra Pradesh, the hub of microfinance activity in the country, brought out an ordinance that effectively curbed microfinance lending and recovery operations. By May 2011, the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s banking regulator, had issued a notification placing caps on interest rates and margins and specifying minimum tenures for relatively larger loan sizes. Was this the end of the microfinance movement in India?

The Singaporean software company Lan-Ray attempted to enter the prepaid cash card (PCC) business in China. Equity funds were sourced to acquire Protection Communications Network (PCN), a payment intermediary in Quanzhou, China, with a vast payment network that could be instrumental to the success of the PCC business. However, PCN would need to demonstrate profitability before it could obtain the licence to run the PCC business.<br><br>Together, Lan-Ray and PCN ventured into the mobile phone campus e-card business, which was initially thought to be able to help PCN achieve profitability in the short run. However, the campus e-card business did not prove to be as profitable as expected. At the same time, the acquisition of PCN by Lan-Ray was problematic, as PCN was unwilling to transfer shares to Lan-Ray. How could Lan-Ray’s CEO finish the acquisition of PCN and make the campus e-card business profitable?

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 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.

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).

When HP established a branch of its corporate research lab in Singapore, the government played a key role through its Economic Development Board (EDB). Chris Whitney, the lab's director, sought to generate revenue from the lab's innovations, making it financially independent from corporate funding. The case explores HP's history in Singapore, and the role of the EDB in encouraging the growth of local R&D capabilities. The case poses questions on the sustainability of the funding model.

Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation (DNATF), a government agency, invests in public-private partnerships to stimulate commercialization of Danish scientific research within the country's industry. DNATF established a process for evaluating proposals, making project awards, and then actively managing those projects to try to improve the likelihood of success. DNATF has a small staff of project managers who act as single points of contact (SPOCs) for the projects. SPOCs are confronted with a broad range of projects rich in scientific complexity and technical issues, well beyond one individual's ability to maintain subject matter expertise. The case poses several questions: How does the organization manage and evaluate scientific and technical progress in circumstances when it is difficult to have subject matter expertise? How do managers know if they are pushing hard enough, or if they are taking too aggressive a stance?

The A 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 farmer incomes. 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. Case B describes the decisions CARE actually made in structuring the project and their choice to become directly involved in the value chain, buying cattle from farmers, negotiating a deal with a large farm to fatten the cattle and transporting the cattle to market. Case B is set three years into the project and begins to describe some of the serious challenges that their strategy is facing. Case B's decision point concerns developing options for how the project can be turned around, including that of CARE playing an indirect role as value chain facilitator and catalyst.

The A 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 farmer incomes. 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. Case B describes the decisions CARE actually made in structuring the project and their choice to become directly involved in the value chain, buying cattle from farmers, negotiating a deal with a large farm to fatten the cattle and transporting the cattle to market. Case B is set three years into the project and begins to describe some of the serious challenges that their strategy is facing. Case B's decision point concerns developing options for how the project can be turned around, including that of CARE playing an indirect role as value chain facilitator and catalyst.

In 2009, when the Indian cement market was buoyant, major Indian players were preparing to move from regional playing fields to pan-India penetration. To become a national player, Jaiprakash Associates Limited grew through acquisitions and setting up new plants. To strengthen its position, the company decided to move from a multiple brand cement portfolio to a single brand entity. It merged its two existing brands of cement, Buniyad Jaypee Cement and Jaypee Buland Cement, into a new brand, Jaypee Cement. Expanding into new geographic markets and creating a pan-India presence for the brand was the motive for this merger. When global brands such as Swiss giant Holcim and France's Lafarge continued with a multi-brand strategy in India, it was understandable that industry experts doubted whether Jaypee's decision to move from multi-branding to mono-branding was correct.

The Google.org: For-Profit Philanthropy case introduces a distinct social enterprise structure, a combination of a philanthropic division of a for-profit corporation and a nonprofit foundation. The case provides an up-to-date, in-depth description of Google.org, one such hybrid, and a brief overview of salesforce.org, a comparable hybrid. This case provides an opportunity to explore the tensions between the for-profit and nonprofit entities that inevitably arise in such structures, as well as factors that contribute to these tensions and solutions that have been attempted to address them. The case revolves around the tension caused when a non-entrepreneurial entity, Google.org, is created within the entrepreneurial culture of Google. Unlike most entrepreneurial ventures, Google.org is flush with cash; like many, it lacks cohesion around mission and vision. HKS Case Number 1960.0

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.

In June 2010, Bharti Airtel, India's largest mobile services operator, acquired the African assets of Bahrain-based Zain Telecom for $10.7 billion-the largest ever cross-border deal in emerging markets. Bharti's executives envisioned that they would replicate the highly successful high-volume, low-cost telecom model that they had pioneered for the Indian masses in Africa. But when they began to integrate the companies, Bharti's executives discovered a slew of unexpected challenges, including cultural differences between their Indian and African employees, poorer infrastructure than they had expected with higher-than-anticipated costs, a monopolistic distribution network, strong competitors, a weak partner ecosystem, and a market that was unresponsive to tariff cuts. In early 2012, a year and a half later, the company has outsourced its networks, IT and customer service operations like it did in India; launched a unified brand across the continent; and culturally integrated with its new environment. Key business metrics, including profit margins and market share, are showing early signs of improvement. But questions remain about whether the company will be able to overtake MTN, Africa's leading player, by lowering tariffs like it did in India, and what its strategy should be going forward.

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.

Keith Palmerston, managing director at PKG Capital, is thinking about what to do with his firm’s holdings in Kraft Foods. In early 2010, Kraft, primarily a grocery products firm, is trying to acquire Cadbury, a well-known U.K.-based chocolate manufacturer. Palmerston is trying to determine if Cadbury is a good fit for Kraft’s operations and if the transaction will generate value for shareholders. This case can be used in a strategy course as part of a negotiations module for strategic analysis, and to discuss the topic of valuation.

This case is a supplement to Pursuing Cadbury (A).

This case examines two of the leading video rental services in the United States, Blockbuster and Netflix, and how each adapted to changing technology and market forces. At the end of the case, Blockbuster has declared bankruptcy and Netflix has seen its first decline in subscribers since its founding in 1997. Netflix also faces a number of new threats, including illegal file sharing, rental kiosks and new low cost video-on-demand (VOD) services. Netflix responds to these threats by announcing that it will split the company in two. Netflix will focus exclusively on streaming content, while a new subsidiary called Qwikster will be restricted to providing DVDs by mail. Customers overwhelmingly react negatively to the announcement, and Netflix's stock price plunges by more than 50 per cent.