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In 2013, the chief executive officer of a marmalade manufacturing company needs to update his accounting records for the fiscal year. In order to complete this task, he gathers the previous year's financial statements and a list of cash receipts and disbursements for the current year in order to perform a financial analysis.

Spreadsheet supplement for teaching note UV6806.

Spreadsheet supplement to case 114026.

Rhonda Magee, a new employee at Regina Broadband, was tasked to prepare slides for the company's next earnings conference call. The company had seen good growth through acquisitions, but now was pursuing a strategy of organic growth. Recent changes had raised potential questions about the company's leadership and compensation. As a policy, Regina's management provided limited future earnings guidance to investors. Since the most recent Q4 and year-end earnings data were still being gathered, Magee decided to draft the slides with provisional headlines and insert placeholders for data and results that the CFO could complete before the earnings conference call later in the week. This disguised case sets the stage for the accompanying B case (UVA-C-2368), which takes place directly after Regina releases its earnings.

Within 3 minutes of releasing its Q4 and year-end earnings, Regina Broadband's stock was down by over 25%. The company's CEO and CFO realized they needed to quickly reframe and sharpen the message they would be giving to Regina's shareholders and investors during that afternoon's conference call, scheduled to take place in 15 minutes.

In mid-2013, the executive chairman of Loblaw Companies Ltd. was considering whether it was in his company’s best interest to acquire Shoppers Drug Mart. In December 2012, Loblaw had announced a proposal to create a real estate investment trust to which it would initially transfer approximately 75 per cent of its substantial real estate holdings, thus unlocking value for its shareholders. At the same time, Shoppers’ shares were trading at an historically attractive valuation. On the other hand, competition was heating up with the move of big box stores, such as Wal-Mart and Target, into Canada and the growth of online purchasing. Moreover, new government regulations aimed at decreasing the high cost of drugs had an immediate impact on pharmaceutical companies. With Loblaw’s shares trading near a six-year high, there was now the attractive opportunity to use them as currency to make an acquisition whose potential synergies were estimated to be in excess of $300 million per year. Was this a good time to act on what had been perceived for a number of years as an attractive merger option? Did it make strategic sense? If so, what price should Loblaw pay for Shoppers?

Komatsu built a very successful business in China over the last two decades. But it is now facing rising competition from lower cost domestic Chinese companies, which are themselves trying to become global players. Facing the same situation, Caterpillar is implementing a two-brand strategy. What should Komatsu do to retain its leadership position in China?

The case presents students with common size balance sheets, financial ratios and related financial information. Students are required to correctly identify a series of corporations in distinctive industries based solely on their analysis of this financial data.

Indian cell phone retailer Go Mobile had implemented high-powered incentives to motivate its store employees to behave as owners and provide exceptional service. As the company scaled up, it faced multiple challenges in building a layer of district managers that were willing and were able to support the highly incentivized store teams. On one hand, the district managers were expected to drive a profitable expansion, supporting complex day-to-day operations at the stores. On the other hand, they were expected to serve as mentors-communicating and teaching the values of the firm to their store managers, sharing best practices, and instilling a long-term perspective of the business. The case presents different mechanisms that the company could implement to motivate the district managers to effectively support the stores and foster growth. This product can be used with the free Job Design Optimization Tool (JDOT), available at: hbsp.harvard.edu/jdot

Sean Warrick is an estate planning adviser at Hellwig & Macon. He is preparing for meetings with two clients. His first clients are Peggy and David Bartley, a professional married couple of moderate wealth. His second clients are Ray and Michelle Polanski, a couple that married late in life and had highly asymmetrical wealth and age. In the case, Warrick is reading a report written by Peter Sullivan, a top estate planning adviser, which considers how estate planning strategies might need to change due to recent changes in estate tax law. Specifically, Warrick must decide whether each couple should continue with their preexisting estate planning strategy, whether they should modify this strategy somewhat, or whether they should abandon their current strategy entirely.

The Kursk, a Russian nuclear-powered submarine sank in the relatively shallow waters of the Barents Sea in August 2000, during a naval exercise. Numerous survivors were reported to be awaiting rescue, and within a week, an international rescue party gathered at the scene, which had possessed between them all that was needed for a successful rescue. Yet they failed to save anybody. Based on the recollections and daily situational reports of Commodore David Russell, who headed the Royal Navy's rescue mission, the case explores how and why this failure-a classic coordination failure-occurred. The Kursk rescue mission also illustrates the challenges of pluralistic risk and disaster management, and asks students to consider how to bring about solutions in the face of pluralistic risk issues, such as the depletion of natural resources and many other disasters, when multiple parties with competing and often conflicting values and expertise have to learn to coordinate and establish a virtual, well-aligned organization.

Lakshmi Mittal, CEO of Mittal Steel, a UK-based company with Indian roots, took advantage of a weakened Arcelor that had successfully won a bidding war for Canadian steel company Dofasco, with an unsolicited bid to buy the company. Mittal's plans for acquiring Arcelor were initially thwarted by concerted opposition from Arcelor's board and several European governments. To Mittal's further surprise, on May 26, Arcelor orchestrated a merger with the Russian steelmaker Severstal. Although the proposed merger did not offer Arcelor shareholders as much value as Mittal's deal, Arcelor had structured the deal in such a way that it did not require shareholders' approval. Mittal wondered how he should respond to the Severstal deal. Did it make sense to continue pursuing Arcelor or should he look for other ways to expand his steel empire?

This case is set in a multi-divisional company with sales offices in several European countries and manufacturing plants in several others. The management control system has been badly designed and students must figure out what is wrong with it and what to do in light of the accountant's recommendation that no changes be made.

This is a case on ABC but with a tricky differential cost decision of the keep/discontinue variety embedded in it. Students need to work with manufacturing overhead allocation, ABC, overhead variances, and variable costing. They also need to see the big picture, which includes a new product line that, while covering its manufacturing overhead, is contributing only about $5,000 to $58,000 of selling, general, and administrative costs.

This case covers a spectrum of management control issues, including the design of responsibility centers, budgeting, measurement and reporting, and behavioral considerations. It is been used successfully as a final exam in a course on management accounting.

This case is set in a health clinic in a Sub-Saharan African country, and requires (a) a fairly standard flexible budget and variance analysis and (b) a somewhat unusual variance analysis. The latter focuses first on variances in volume and mix/efficiency based on minutes per visit rather than cost, and then requires the student to translate this information into an analysis of staffing needs.

This case is helpful for illustrating the concept of cost drivers, and demonstrating how the use of cost drivers can help managers better understand the forces that govern the use of resources in their organizations. It also can be used to demonstrate that by changing a fundamental cost accounting decision (cost centers, in this instance), an organization can change the cost of its products or services.

The case provides a forum that allows an instructor to discuss some of the more counterintuitive aspects of financial accounting, which should help students to increase their grasp of the concepts. The case could stand alone if the goal were to give students just a little information about financial accounting. Ideally, it is taught in conjunction with the Brookstone Ob-Gyn Associates (B) case.

Supplement for TCG161

This is a pretty simple case in preparing a budget, with a couple of tricky spins to make it interesting. It is designed to be accompanied by Pacific Park School (B), in which the program ran a deficit, and students must calculate the relevant variances.