Freeman school organizes a finance case competition every year. Last year, teams from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of South Carolina, Wake Forest University, and Washington University participated. An internal competition is held to select the team to represent Tulane.
My team(Asim, Waron, Julio) and I participated in the internal competition on Saturday. We had to get up at 7am ! We were pretty worried because we were a team of first years, going up against teams comprised entirely of second year students. The case was a HBS case regarding a Leveraged Buyout of Ducati by TPG. After intensive deliberations, we decided to go ahead with the concept of NPV, and used concepts such as Beta, WACC, Sunk costs etc.
We had 5 hours to discuss, and 30 more minutes to practice our presentation. We were judged by 6 finance professors. We were the first to go and had no idea if we were remotely correct. The professors grilled us and we had made a few mistakes. We were on the right track but had not taken some facts into consideration. We then sat to watch the presentations by other teams. We realized our basic thinking was right.
The top three spots were taken by second year teams. The other first year team (Alex, Vincent, Pavan) performed well too. I am sure we all will put up a better performance next year.
Karthik Mahadevan | kmahadev@tulane.edu | mkarthik01@gmail.com