A team of students from IIM Bangalore has won the prestigious Asia Private Equity Investment Leveraged Buyout Case Challenge at Singapore. The team comprised four students from the batch PGP 2015-17 including Shikhar Rajendra Sethi, Shifa Garg, Madhav Smarda and Pulkit Aggarwal.
Organised by Singapore Management University (SMU), along with the New York School of Finance (NYSF), the event had 30 teams from the world's best schools, including Columbia and London Business School, vying for top honors.
The event involved three stages. In the first stage, participants were required to prepare a financial valuation, an investment thesis and a presentation showcasing a financial strategy for a globally known firm.
The second stage involved presenting their idea via Skype to the director of NYSF, Romero, at New York.
Five teams qualified for Stage 3, at Singapore where they were given a new case to tackle, this time a Hong Kong based Cosmetics retailer. The other teams hailed from SMU (2), Paris Dauphine University, and Columbia Business School.
This round involved core financial valuations and assessing the potential of an LBO for the firm. At Singapore, on 1st March, the teams presented their analyses to a panel of judges that included Temasek Holdings and World Bank executives, amongst others.
The IIMB team won a gold medal, a cash prize of around 2.43 lakh and level 1 CAIA scholarship.