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Data Sheet for #ST52A.

Data Sheet for #ST52A.

This case presents the real-world history of a field program to promote the financing of viable small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in one of the poorest and most troubled countries of the world. A key goal and expectation of the donor-funded project was the promotion of social enterprises - sustainable local businesses that create employment and promote economic development. A second, and just as significant expectation, is that the services provided by this program on a subsidized basis should also become sustainable, as a service that can be costed-out to the financial institutions and clients. The idea of 2 Bridges refers to the two sides of the effort: one that operates through lending by commercial banks, and one that operates through creation of an angel venture fund to invest in equity of the SMEs. The program in Honduras is described in detail, along with issues and questions for further analysis, discussion, debate, and potential implementation in other countries and contexts.

CEMEX S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE: CX) - Cemex - had made a name for itself in the global marketplace for two things - excellence in execution and rapid growth through acquisition. In an era in which globalization was a practice for multinational firms calling highly industrialized countries home, Cemex broke the mold. It was a multinational player calling a lower income country, Mexico, home. Led by Lorenzo Zambrano, the grandson of the founder, Cemex had followed a rapid growth trajectory through repeated acquisitions. Now, in 2006, it was once again on the prowl, stalking the Rinker Group of Australia. But Rinker was not for sale.

CEMEX of Mexico closed its acquisition of The Rinker Groups of Australia in April 2007 after raising its offer to US$15.85 per share. This represented a 54% premium over Rinker's closing price prior to the initiation of the hostile offer. CEMEX, in-line with its customary acquisition process, financed the entire purchase with debt. But within a year CEMEX was struggling to service its sizeable outstanding debt as business conditions and financial results declined with the financial crisis of 2008. The company was facing debt service of $5.5 billion in 2009, money which it did not have. CEMEX would need to propose a strong and convincing financial restructuring plan to its creditors if it wished to survive.

"Noble and The Valuation of Its Investment Associates" focusses on the Noble Group's performance since 2011 and the impact of the adverse research report published by the independent outfit, Iceberg Research in 2015, on the company. The veracity of Iceberg Research's reports is analyzed. The case uses financial statement analysis, valuing companies through income, market and asset/cost approaches to assess if Noble Group paid purchase considerations in excess of the target firm's intrinsic values while acquiring associates, particularly Australia-based Yancoal. The case study also provides the setting to use macroeconomic factors in conjunction with valuation techniques and financial statement analysis to evaluate a potential investment.

Fuller traveled from a four-room tenement bordering Chicago's infamous Cabrini-Green Housing projects to speaking at conferences around the world and typically holding court wherever she went. As a teenager, she helped raise her siblings. As a Wall Street executive, she navigated the investment management world to generate attractive investment results for clients. And as the Chief Investment Officer of New York State Employees' Common Retirement Fund (CRF), she helped manage the third largest state pension fund in the United States. Fuller's 5'2" height understated her reputational stature, as audiences where she was featured anxiously awaited hearing her market outlook, innovative investment allocations and industry insights for effective state pension fund strategies.

Two partners commence a rollup in the quick-service restaurant segment. They focus on operating improvements and spinning-off real estate.

The case describes the efforts of Group Audit at DBS Bank Singapore to enhance the value of services it offers to the organisation by adopting various methodologies that would make Internal Audit (IA) more effective. The case specifically focuses on Agile Auditing practices that was implemented on a pilot basis in 2016 as a part of Group Audit's Future of Auditing initiative, which was aimed at making IA productive, proactive, predictive and preventive. It demonstrates how introducing agile practices to IA can help overcome the limitations of traditional auditing practices, and also assesses the additional benefits of agile auditing. It also discusses the strategy used by the Internal Audit team to gain stakeholder engagement and support to implement agile auditing within the organisation and examines the tools used by the team to assist in executing agile auditing. It elaborates on the SCRUM framework adopted by the team and the technology enablers that enabled the DBS internal audit team to execute their pilot Internal Audit projects successfully. Finally, the case highlights the advantages that agile auditing brought for DBS Group audit, and provides insight into how an agile approach to auditing can be successfully adopted in an organisation with minimal disruption within the existing team setup.

The case is set in December 2017, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and describes the journey of a mobile financial service (MFS) provider called SureCash in Bangladesh, and the various facets of the MFS industry in the country. The MFS industry in Bangladesh is perceived to be oliogopolistic. While this is a difficult market for a new entrant to get into, it is not yet a saturated marketplace. This is primarily because a considerable part of the population in the country still remain 'unbanked'. Amidst two significantly large players in the MFS market in Bangladesh, smaller players like SureCash have tried to create a niche by associating themselves with education fee collection initiatives, salary disbursement programs and government led projects like the Primary Education Stipend Program (PESP) launched by the Government of Bangladesh. While associating with large scale projects like PESP has its own advantages, taking up such large scale creation of MFS accounts has several challenges as well. The case on SureCash encapsulates this story by elaborating on the difficulties faced by the company in digitising the PESP initiative and opening accounts for more than 10 million mothers. This had helped the company to promote Financial Inclusion in rural Bangladesh for a section of the demographic who were less likely to have access to formal financial services than their male counterparts. Notably, Bangladesh is a country where a significant percentage of the total population still remained 'unbanked'. What remained to be seen was whether SureCash could keep the mothers engaged in their MFS platform over the long run? Also what could be the best strategy for SureCash to grow their presence in Bangladesh?

Spreadsheet supplement for case UV7263.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 217049.

This Reading introduces practical problems encountered when estimating and applying the cost of capital in a DCF valuation. It applies, but does not derive, key ideas from modern portfolio theory and is accessible to readers who have not yet studied portfolio theory. The reading begins by defining the cost of capital narrowly, as a discount rate (in a DCF valuation) that must equal the opportunity cost of funds, or equivalently, the sum of the time value of money and a risk premium. This intuitive explanation is followed by the CAPM equation, and practical discussions of systematic risk, beta, and the equity market risk premium. The Reading then introduces WACC as an alternative calculation for the cost of capital and shows, graphically and mathematically, the correspondence between CAPM and WACC in the absence of taxes. The Reading also explains that the "(1-t)" adjustment term in the formula for WACC with taxes compensates for missing interest tax shields in the standard calculation of Free Cash Flow. The next section is a step-by-step explanation of how to calculate WACC for a real company, including discussions of data and sources commonly used by practitioners to compute leverage ratios, the cost of debt, the tax rate, the risk-free rate, and so forth. Finally, the reading walks through an illustrative calculation of WACC for Coca-Cola, as of December 31, 2015, using data from Coca-Cola's SEC filings and the capital markets. The Supplemental Reading section examines some of the limitations of WACC as a discount rate as well as some common errors that practitioners make in computing and using WACC. It also covers two alternatives to WACC-based DCF, the APV and CCF methods.

Lending Club follows the path of founder and CEO Renaud Laplanche as he scales his successful P2P lending company both pre- and post-IPO. From debating with bankers on the proper valuation metrics for the company, to managing customer acquisition costs as the competitive landscape rapidly changes, the Lending Club case explores several key challenges that come with operating a fin-tech company at scale.

Student spreadsheet for case W17219.

In November 2014, an intern at Top Dog Wealth Management in Brisbane, Australia, was assisting with a market evaluation and company evaluation for Medibank Private Limited (Medibank). The upcoming Medibank initial public offering (IPO) was set to be one of Australia’s largest and was expected to generate more than AU$4 billion from shareholders who were keen to own a piece of the country’s largest private health insurer. Because the intern was new to the deal, her supervisor gave her access to his notes and directed her to use Bloomberg terminals. As she read through this material, the intern pondered some important questions: What was Medibank worth? Which valuation methods should she use?

In November 2014, an intern at Top Dog Wealth Management in Brisbane, Australia, was assisting with a market evaluation and company evaluation for Medibank Private Limited (Medibank). The upcoming Medibank initial public offering (IPO) was set to be one of Australia's largest and was expected to generate more than AU$4 billion from shareholders who were keen to own a piece of the country's largest private health insurer. Because the intern was new to the deal, her supervisor gave her access to his notes and directed her to use Bloomberg terminals. As she read through this material, the intern pondered some important questions: What was Medibank worth? Which valuation methods should she use?

Student spreadsheet for case UV7259.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 216059.

This is the first in a set of two Readings on risk and return. It introduces the ideas of financial risk and return, at first intuitively, with a discussion of investor risk aversion and tradeoffs, and then formally, with a basic explanation of pertinent statistics. It introduces probability distributions and their parameters-mean and standard deviation-as measures of expected return and risk. Using sample statistics from historical returns as coordinate pairs, it plots asset classes in mu-sigma space to give a graphical representation of risk and return, and defines dominance. To cement understanding, the text steps through calculations of risk and return statistics from historical price data for Microsoft to mu-sigma space. The second half of the reading covers the co-movement of stock returns using sample covariance, beta, and correlation computed for pairs of risky assets. Scatter plots and linear regression are introduced to calculate beta. The Reading introduces essential portfolio math, with portfolio weights and correlation coefficients. It shows that a portfolio's risk is lower than the weighted average risk of its component assets if the assets are not perfectly positively correlated. This fundamental statistical property gives rise to the economics of diversification. The Reading contains 7 web-based Interactive Illustrations. The first demonstrates the Central Limit Theorem. The second ensures a solid understanding of how returns are calculated from prices and dividends. The third shows how to create a histogram.