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In December 2019, Pembina Pipeline Corporation (Pembina) must evaluate an opportunity to partner with the Western Indigenous Pipeline Group (WIPG) to bid for the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) project owned by the Canadian government. Pembina’s chief executive officer had previously stated that the company was unlikely to bid on the pipeline due to the challenging legal landscape, especially regarding Indigenous land rights. However, since WIPG consists of Indigenous communities along the pipeline’s route, partnering could mitigate these concerns. If the project succeeds, the payback could solidify Pembina’s position as a market leader in oil and gas. Should Pembina proceed with the WIPG partnership? And if they do, how should they manage relations with governments and other stakeholders?

As the leading e-commerce platform in Hong Kong, Hong Kong TV Shopping Network Company Limited (HKTVmall) faced an important challenge in early 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic had severely disrupted the global supply chain for personal protective equipment (PPE), and prices for masks and other products on its website had skyrocketed. While management had little knowledge or experience in sourcing or producing such products, they wondered whether they had a responsibility to act on this matter. Despite its meteoric growth, the company had yet to turn a profit, so the executives were unsure as to whether they should let the invisible hand of the market restore the equilibrium between supply and demand or take an extra step to guarantee a stable supply of PPE. If the platform intervened, was contracting with new local suppliers the right way to go, or should HKTVmall itself start producing PPE?

In late 2022, E-Mart, South Korea’s leading supermarket chain, had pulled out of major Asian markets such as China and Vietnam after experiencing poor performance, and the company planned to expand into the US market. In the Asian markets, E-Mart relied on a direct entry mode, but in the US it changed its mode of entry by acquiring local companies and planning to open new grocery brand stores. Although the US market has substantial growth opportunities due to its large size, it is not easy to succeed there because of limited profit margins and fierce competition. Could E-Mart establish a foothold in the US supermarket and grocery store industry? What strategies should it develop to succeed in this new market?

In the quarter ending March 2022, Apple Inc. (Apple)’s share in the Chinese smartphone market fell to 17.9 per cent from 21.7 per cent in the previous quarter. Business analysts attributed the falling share to weak consumer sentiments; a lack of innovations; and major supply-side headwinds, including frequent COVID-related lockdowns in China, power shortages, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the trade and technology war between the United States and China. Apple needed to identify strategies to gain a leading share in the Chinese market. In the face of demand- and supply-side adversities in China, it also needed to reconsider its supply chain and manufacturing base. Should Apple keep its supply chain concentrated in China, to reap the benefits arising from the economies of scale in the production process? Or should it pursue geographic diversification for its supply chain, to protect itself from the major problems hovering on the horizon?

LINE Corporation was started in 2000 as a local company in Japan focused on developing a mobile communication application. It later expanded its reach to operate a wide range of products and services in various markets including retail, entertainment, financial technology, and artificial intelligence. LINE Corporation was operating in two global markets—Asia and North America—with its top four strategic business units. The LINE mobile messaging application was the cornerstone of the company, launched in Japan shortly after the Great East Japan earthquake in 2011 to allow individuals to connect with loved ones, participate in relief efforts, and express their feelings through emojis and stickers. LINE FRIENDS INC. was a standalone entity created to sell and distribute character-related merchandise featuring the popular animal characters Brown, Cony, and Sally. LINE PLAY Corporation, the company’s popular avatar-building game, had over 75 million registered users, but some users saw it as merely a cash-grabbing game. LINE Next Inc. was a venture focused on developing and expanding the global non-fungible token ecosystem. In 2023, the main issue that LINE Corporation was facing was how best to allocate budget and resources to the two markets (Asia and North America) and to its top four strategic business units.

In March 2020, the German online travel experience platform GetYourGuide faced an abrupt drop in revenues in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the drop, the company had been thriving, grown from a simple idea thought up by a group of friends in a student dormitory into a market-leading company in the travel experience industry with a valuation of over US$1 billion (a “unicorn” start-up) and more than 600 employees across fifteen global offices. Co-founder Johannes Reck and his team needed to determine a path forward—but how to prioritize responses to the crisis? What would the impact of any responses be on the company’s longer-term strategy? And how could the responses be aligned with the company’s values, which centred on entrepreneurial vision and commitment to employees? Whichever action plan was chosen, decisions would have to be made swiftly.

In late 2021, Vahe Dombalagian, a managing director at Madison Dearborn Partners (MDP), contacted MoneyGram International Inc. (MoneyGram) chief executive officer Alex Holmes to discuss the middle-market private equity (PE) firm’s potential interest in a transaction with MoneyGram. MoneyGram was a global leader in the cross-border peer-to-peer (P2P) payment market, working to transition to the fast-growing digital payment market amid the emergence of low-cost financial technology competitors.<br><br>The case provides a discussion about deal evaluation metrics used by leveraged buyout (LBO) PE firms and provides necessary information to construct an LBO model to calculate the internal rate of return (IRR) and multiple of invested capital (MOIC) to determine an appropriate offer.<br><br>MDP was granted access to internal MoneyGram information and met with firm representatives as it worked with its financial advisers to obtain a debt commitment letter. The banks agreed to fund a debt financing package, and MoneyGram notified bidders that definitive acquisition proposals needed to be received by January 24, 2022. The MDP deal team needed to work quickly to finalize their offer.

In December 2021, Steven Cahillane, chief executive officer of The Kellogg’s Company, was facing worker unrest and a union strike. After several rounds of discussion between the workers' union and management, an amicable settlement could not be reached related to abolishing the two-tier pay system that Kellogg's introduced in 2015. After negotiations unfolded and management and the union still could not reach a conclusion, the union launched a strike on October 7, 2021. How could Cahillane improve relations with the workers' union? How could he bring the strike to an end? Does Kellogg’s management have more bargaining power than workers?

In December 2022, Maruti Suzuki India Limited (Maruti Suzuki), the undisputed leader in the Indian car market, was evaluating the various alternatives for its continued growth and sustained performance. In 2015, building on the company's success selling no-frills cars, Maruti Suzuki launched its New Exclusive Automotive Experience (NEXA) line to attract customers who were seeking advanced car models. However, the emergence of electric vehicles posed a key challenge for Maruti Suzuki specifically because it lacked capabilities in this arena. To achieve continued growth and performance, Maruti had to prioritize among three alternatives: building upon its success in selling used cars, further building on the NEXA line, and aggressively trying to launch new electric vehicle models.

In 2023, Tesla, Inc. (Tesla), was the most valuable automotive company in the world. Over 20 years, it had developed revolutionary products and a large, complex, global supply chain network. After announcing plans to spend nearly $150 billion to achieve the strategic goal of selling 20 million vehicles per year, it needed to dramatically expand its capacity. Chief executive officer Elon Musk was facing a key challenge: deciding what changes needed to be made to Tesla’s global supply chain to support its strategic objectives. What supply chain capabilities would Tesla need to support these plans?

The Paris Agreement, which came into force on November 4, 2016, applied to Hong Kong, where Kam Sing Wong had been secretary for the environment of the HKSARG since July 2012. Wong wanted every business sector and household to embark on a new low carbon journey through cleaner energy, energy conservation, and green commuting and to nurture a “use less, waste less” culture. On June 8, 2022, Wong had to announce an increase in the charge Hong Kong shoppers paid to retailers for each plastic shopping bag they used, which was currently set at HK$0.50 (US$0.06). Even if Wong doubled the amount to HK$1.00, this would still be a small amount in absolute terms. What messages would be necessary in order to communicate to people the importance of using less plastic? Wong had to make a big decision about how much of a change to make to this small amount of HK$0.50. A small change in the actions of each citizen of Hong Kong could potentially be amplified into a large amount of absolute waste reduction.

As Hasbro Inc.’s Wizards of the Coast LLC (Wizards) worked to design the next iteration of its popular tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), word leaked that it was looking to change its decades-old Open Game License. This would restrict third-party contributions to the game and reduce gameplay options for customers, in favour of increased protection of D&D’s game mechanics as Wizards’ intellectual property. Wizards’ delayed reaction to the leak gave way to an organized response from the D&D community, eventually pushing Wizards to give up its efforts to restrict licensing and take further steps to restore trust. What, if anything, went wrong with Wizards’ priorities, and what should its priorities be going forward?

In early 2018, WhatsApp—the cross-platform messaging and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service—began testing its WhatsApp Payments (Payments) service, designed to enable digital payment transactions in India. By late 2020, the platform had rolled out the initial launch of its Payments feature within India, with the National Payments Corporation of India agreeing to a staggered launch. However, despite the number of Payments users increasing from twenty million to forty million between November 2021 and April 2022, the platform witnessed stagnation in customer retention due to faulty transactions and inefficient processes that resulted in driving customers away. WhatsApp’s challenge was to review its customer value proposition to gain new customers and retain existing ones. How should it communicate this customer value proposition to its target customer base to attract new users? Would it be more appropriate to launch Payments as a standalone app?

In July 2019, 15-year-old Charli D’Amelio posted a dance video on the relatively new social media platform TikTok and became a TikTok sensation, soon becoming the first person to reach 50 million followers on the app and earning her a spot in the Guinness World Records. TikTok’s meteoric rise, however, was at risk of being short-lived. In 2020, the US government was concerned about the app’s rapid expansion and threatened to ban it in the United States. Even if the ban announced by the US government failed to materialize, the D’Amelios and numerous other up-and-coming celebrity TikTokers had to contend with many other issues that threatened to compromise their growing social media influencer business. There was growing public concern about TikTok’s lack of content moderation policy, which resulted in the routine posting of questionable content on the platform. The company was also slow in developing a monetization scheme to incentivize, remunerate, and retain its most influential creators. How could the D’Amelios best “future-proof” their fast-growing but fickle business against potential risk?

In May 2022, Sri Lanka faced its worst economic crisis since its 1948 independence from Britain. The crisis led to skyrocketing prices, double-digit inflation, a more than 100 per cent increase in fuel prices, multi-hour power cuts, depleting foreign exchange reserves, an acute shortage of food and medicines, a dramatic collapse in incomes, mounting government deficits, devastating government policies, record debt defaults, and a downgraded currency rating. This was a dramatic shift, since Sri Lanka had once been the fastest-growing nation in the South Asian region with the second-highest per capita income in terms of purchasing power parity. It had the highest Human Capital Index among countries in South Asia. After the end of the civil war in 2009, Sri Lanka had accessed borrowings from the international market for infrastructure investments and earned the reputation of being a disciplined borrower that had never defaulted. By 2019, the World Bank had classified Sri Lanka as an upper-income country. The country’s economic crisis of 2022 resulted from politically motivated inefficiencies in government finances caused by unproductive spending. An unsustainable current account deficit, along with a large fiscal deficit, led to high and unsustainable government debt. Two black swan events—the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the 2022 intensification of the Russo-Ukrainian War—sparked the crisis. Though the International Monetary Fund (IMF), G7 countries, and India and China facilitated Sri Lanka’s bailout and prevented the country from defaulting on its loan repayments, an action plan to bring about structural changes was the only real remedy that could bring the country out of crisis and allow it to sustain itself over the longer term. This case highlights the factors that led to the crisis and the dilemmas faced by Sri Lanka’s new prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, as he worked to draw up a restructuring plan and bring Sri Lanka’s economy back from crisis.

In October 2022, Chinese car company BYD Auto Co., Ltd. (BYD) announced its entry into the Indian automobile market with the Atto 3, an electric sports utility vehicle (e-SUV). Despite facing challenges in India’s emerging electric vehicle (EV) market and the close scrutiny on investments from China, BYD aimed to sell 15,000 units to be assembled at its existing Chennai plant, to establish manufacturing facilities, and to open fifty-three dealerships by the end of 2023. BYD’s push into India was part of its larger expansion strategy to diversify into new markets globally to include Japan, Thailand, the United States, and Brazil. However, the company needed to determine its target segment, who its competitors were, and what macroeconomic challenges it would face so that it could establish a position within India’s competitive car market. The existing Chennai plant saved BYD from having to obtain new approvals from the government, but the company still had to navigate the challenges of entering a new market with a nascent EV infrastructure.

Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Limited defaulted on repayment of its financial obligations in June 2019, and in December 2019, shortly after the Reserve Bank of India superseded its board, it was subjected to the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process of India’s Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. Because it was the first financial services provider to be subjected to the resolution process, the lenders—known as the committee of creditors—of the troubled company had to select the most appropriate resolution plan among the multiple bids they received. The poor financial position and high level of risk owing to exposure to the wholesales/corporate sector made the lenders’ prospects of recovery bleak and rendered the company less valuable for any prospective takeover or merger. The resolution of the first financial services provider subjected to the resolution process provided a test case for how a committee of creditors could deal with complex issues and still salvage the interests of the different stakeholders, including the secured and unsecured lenders and retail deposit holders.

By early November 2022, Elon Musk, the new owner of the social media platform Twitter, had fired approximately 75 per cent of the company’s workforce. The decision regarding which employees to dismiss was based both on low performance criteria and unwillingness to commit to a new demanding corporate culture. Twitter had mainly incurred losses since its launch in 2006. Musk acquired the company after several glitches in the purchase agreement regarding the accuracy of verified versus fake (spam) Twitter accounts. Musk’s new corporate vision, which he termed “Twitter 2.0,” would require employees to work long hours at Twitter’s offices. This plan was in stark contrast to the work-from-home policy that had been established by the company’s previous leaders. Musk also fired large numbers of employees without appropriate notice. Understandably, these actions generated negative responses from fired employees. But there were also concerns from observers regarding the damaged brand image of Twitter under Musk’s leadership. Could Musk lead a positive change in Twitter’s culture? Could he improve the company’s employer brand value? What traits and strategies should he consider to become a more responsible leader?

Global furniture giant Inter IKEA Systems B.V. (IKEA) announced its intent to become a circular and climate-positive business by 2030. In order to achieve these goals, the company had to find ways for consumers to cycle end-of-life products back to its facilities. IKEA was implementing this process—known as reverse logistics—via international sell-back and leasing programs. It was unclear, however, if the company’s efforts would be enough to make its operations sustainable. Additionally, the question remained as to whether IKEA was truly focused on sustainability and responsibility or if it was simply attempting to maximize customer lifetime value.

This case series focuses on Theranos Inc. (Theranos), a health care technology start-up founded by Elizabeth Holmes in 2003. Theranos focused on developing a revolutionary blood-testing technology that was supposed to be able to detect diseases using only a few drops of blood. Once valued at US$10 billion, the company never demonstrated its alleged technological breakthrough, and Holmes was eventually charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud and deceit. In 2018, Theranos was forced to shut down its operations, and in January 2022, Holmes was found guilty of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The case series explores Theranos’s history, as well as the role of overconfidence bias in Theranos’s downfall.