An SMU team has emerged in the Top 10 and won the Honourable Mention award at the 2015 edition of the ISB-Ivey Case Competition, which has rapidly gained prominence in India and abroad since its inception in 2010, and is widely considered an important source for India-centric cases by business schools around the world.

The 2015 Competition had attracted 86 entries from more than 50 business schools in India, the United States, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.  The cases spanned a wide spectrum of management areas, from more traditional subjects such as Strategy, Marketing, Finance and Leadership, to growing areas of interest such as Social Enterprise and Business Ethics.

For the first time, this year’s competition featured a team from SMU comprising Assistant Professor of Finance Gennaro Bernile from the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, and postgraduate students Anand Shankar (Master of Applied Finance programme) and Rahul Rajani (MBA programme).  Their winning case, which was also the only finance case in the Top 10, was titled ‘Alchemy of a Private Equity deal in India: Shriram Transport Finance’.

The case delved into the much publicised private equity (PE) deal, where Texas Pacific Group (TPG) had led an investment in Shriram Group.  The investment in 2006 by TPG was one of the earliest PE investments in India and was a bellwether for the Indian PE industry.  The in-depth analysis by the SMU team covered several critical issues, including exit structure, timeline for exit, valuations and regulatory hurdles.

The team positioned the readers to evaluate whether or not the decision to exit was made at the right time and by the right method through presenting multiple scenarios for a successful exit, including IPO, trade sales and a secondary sale.  The case also touched upon other significant aspects of the Indian PE landscape, including market dynamics, challenges of investing in a family-run business, capturing value in non-buyout deals and valuations.

Professor Arun Pereira, Executive Director, Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Case Development, Indian School of Business (ISB), noted that the Competition continued to scale new heights in quality and impact.  “We see more and more high quality cases written that have the potential to make classroom learning very compelling and impactful.  The cases received reflect India’s varied economic landscape, from family businesses to multinationals, and from social ventures to e-commerce entrepreneurs.  This annual competition ensures an ever increasing supply of current, high-quality India cases for the global MBA classroom,” he said.

Specifically on the SMU team’s case, Professor David Sharp, Faculty Director, India and Associate Professor, Ivey Business School, commented, “The context is very interesting and PE is an area of interest to many students so discussing this in the Indian context would be a great case.”

On the team’s win, Assistant Professor Bernile, said, “It was a great learning experience for us!  There is so much hard work behind crafting cases for classroom study and this extent of rigour is needed to mould student’s understanding of the subject.  My student co-authors, Anand Shankar and Rahul Rajani, were supportive and highly committed to writing a high quality case.  My team and I would like to thank the organisers of the competition, and we look forward to actively participating in future editions.”

[Photo: Assistant Professor of Finance Gennaro Bernile from the SMU Lee Kong Chian School of Business.]

In winning the award, the SMU team will be recognised at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s 5th University Industry Congress: Global Higher Education Summit 2015 to be held in New Delhi, India, in December 2015.  Their case will also be marketed to a global audience of business schools through Ivey and distributed through Ivey Publishing, the largest publisher of India based business cases in the world.

Full results of the case competition can be found here: http://www.isb.edu/isb-ivey-global-case-competition-2015