Case studies

In 2007, Best Buy was the leading electronics retailer in the United States with more than 941 stores, revenue totaling $31 billion, and a market cap of $21 billion. In 2005, Best Buy had adopted a new business model, culture, and customer-segmentation template called Customer Centricity. This move created volatility in the price of Best Buy stock because of the higher-than-expected employee costs that went with this new way of doing business and the difficulty of executing the old and the new business models simultaneously while the new model was rolled out. Best Buy responded to Wall Street's short-term focus in a myriad of ways. It first asked for investor patience, and stressed the strong operating results achieved in Best Buy stores operating under the new model. But in June 2007, after the stock dropped again, the CEO knew he had to decide whether to open more Best Buy stores, increase the company's dividend, or increase the stock-repurchase program.

This short case could be handed out at the end of class discussion on “J&L Railroad” [UVA-F-1053] in preparation for the following class, or if students are more experienced with hedging and option pricing, the instructor may choose to cover both cases in a single class period. It is the companion case to “J&L Railroad” [UVA-F-1053], and presents more technical issues regarding the hedging problem by requiring students to understand option-pricing principles. The board likes the CFO's hedging recommendations, but it wants a more careful analysis of the bank's prices for its risk-management products: the caps and floors. Besides demanding an understanding of option pricing, this case puts particular emphasis on the calculation and use of implied volatility.

The Home Depot case is a great story. It's about entrepreneurship, growth, CEO leadership, and the dramatic impact, good and bad, a CEO can have on a company's growth culture, strategy, and performance. Home Depot had faced market growth challenges for the last seven years as it tried in numerous ways to reignite its growth engine. The case explores the growth strategies of CEOs Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, and Blank's successor Bob Nardelli, a former GE executive. After examining Home Depot's growth history, the case challenges students to devise a growth strategy for the company under a new CEO.

Tiffany & Company was the leading U.S. luxury jewelry brand, generating more than $2.6 billion in revenue through 167 retail outlets globally and from catalogue and Internet sales. For nearly 170 years, Tiffany had managed its brand. In February 2007, a hedge fund, Trian Fund Management LP, announced that it had bought a 5.5% stake in Tiffany, and became its largest shareholder. Trian believed that Tiffany was undervalued and stated that it wanted to help the company “improve its earnings per share by addressing various operational and strategic issues.” In response, Tiffany began to consider different actions to increase shareholder value.

TourAmerica is negotiating a master contract with Voyager Inn International (Bethesda) for hotel rooms during the 1995 tourist season. Issues under consideration include number of rooms during peak, mid-, and off-periods, room rates, breakfast prices, and the cost of ancillary services. While the hotel manager is evaluated on the basis of several criteria, including adjusted daily rates, occupancy rates, and food and beverage profitability, and is also provided with a utility scheme to facilitate trade-offs among the criteria, TourAmerica uses an effective cost per registrant (adjusted for intangibles). These two approaches provide an opportunity to contrast measurement schemes and to justify the use of utility functions. This case is a role-play exercise and must be used in conjunction with “Voyager Inn International” (UVA-QA-0463).

This case, along with its B case (UVA-QA-0865), is an effective vehicle for introducing students to the use of machine-learning techniques for classification. The specific context is predicting customer retention based on a wide range of customer attributes/features. The specific techniques could include (but are not limited to): regressions (linear and logistic), variable selection (forward/backward and stepwise), regularizations (e.g., LASSO), classification and regression trees (CART), random forests, graduate boosted trees (xgboost), neural networks, and support vector machines (SVM).

The case is suitable for an advanced data analysis (data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence) class at all levels: upper-level business undergraduate, MBA, EMBA, as well as specialized graduate or undergraduate programs in analytics (e.g., masters of science in business analytics [MSBA] and masters of management analytics [MMA]) and/or in management (e.g., masters of science in management [MScM] and masters in management [MiM, MM]).

The teaching note for the case contains the pedagogy and the analyses, alongside the detailed explanations of the various techniques and their implementations in R (code provided in Exhibits and supplementary files). Python code, as well as the spreadsheet implementation in XLMiner, are available upon request.

At three o'clock in the morning on September 10, 2001, Thierry Hautillac, a risk arbitrageur, learns of the final agreement between Pinault-Printemps-Redoute SA (“PPR”) and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA (“LVMH”). After a contest for control of Gucci lasting over two years, PPR has emerged as the winner. PPR and LVMH have agreed for PPR to buy about half of LVMH's stock in Gucci for $94 per share, for Gucci to pay an extraordinary dividend of $7 per share, and for PPR to give a two and a half year put option with a strike price of $101.50 to the public shareholders in Gucci. The primary task for the student in this case is to recommend a course of action for Hautillac: should he sell his 2% holding of Gucci shares when the market opens, continue to hold his shares, or buy more shares? The student must estimate the risky arbitrage returns from each of these choices. As a basis for this decision, the student must value the terms of payment and consider what the Gucci stock price will do upon the market's open. The student must determine the intrinsic value of Gucci using a DCF model as well as information on peer firms and transactions. The student must consider potential synergies between Gucci and PPR and between Gucci and LVMH. The student must assess the likelihood of a higher bid, using analysis of price changes at earlier events in the contest for clues.

In early 2012, an equity analyst, was examining the jet fuel hedging strategy of JetBlue Airways for the coming year. Because airlines cross-hedged their jet fuel price risk using derivatives contracts on other oil products such as WTI and Brent crude oil, they were exposed to basis risk. In 2011, dislocations in the oil market led to a Brent-WTI premium wherein jet fuel started to move with Brent instead of WTI, as it traditionally did. Faced with hedging losses, several U.S. airlines started to change their hedging strategies, moving away from WTI. But others worried that the Brent-WTI premium might be a temporary phenomenon. For 2012, would JetBlue continue using WTI for its hedges, or would it switch to an alternative such as Brent?

This case challenges students to apply financial reporting concepts pertaining, most notably, to liabilities and expenses in a specific corporate situation. In the context of an interesting, but noncomplex, technical accounting issue, students debate the best way for Adenosine Therapeutics to present its compensation arrangements in its financial statements. In addition, this case also prompts students to debate the best way for a growing company, with cash constraints, to provide incentive and maintain top employees.

This case raises the question: How does a company reasonably estimate and record entries for uncollectible trade receivables, and under what circumstances are receivables written off as uncollectible? The required accounting transactions for the case involve estimating a receivables allowance both as a percentage of sales and as a percentage of accounts receivable and making specific account judgments under the direct write?off method. The subjective issues involve analyzing and assessing a company's methods of collection and accounting for bad debts.

Students act as outside analysts attempting to determine how Alfin will finance its expected growth based on sales of antiwrinkle cream.

While preparing a financial forecast, the newly promoted CFO of a small and profitable but financially constrained ready-mix concrete company must choose between renegotiating debt obligations, postponing long overdue capital improvements that will prevent more costly future repairs, or reducing the dividend payment to a parent company that just recently purchased the firm.

After having negotiated major financial and operating decisions with its parent company, the CFO of this small ready-mix concrete subsidiary is asked to provide a valuation of the subsidiary. A one-year forecast of financial statements is provided along with information on long-term operating expectations and capital costs. This otherwise straightforward valuation exercise is enhanced by (1) the need to select between the parent- or comparable-firm costs of capital, (2) sufficient guidance to perform an illuminating sensitivity analysis, and (3) a sufficiently clear and rich context in which to illustrate the linkages between operating and financing choices. A teaching note and instructor and student Excel spreadsheets are available.

The business-travel department of American Express is facing rapid growth in demand but is plagued with overstaffing in some offices because of the broad distribution of client demand. Management's challenge is to reduce costs in local offices while maintaining a high level of service. One alternative under consideration is a centralized regional business-travel center to handle reservation functions for up to 20 other Amexco offices. This case gives students the opportunity to apply queuing theory to a practical situation. Normally, in order to facilitate the numerous calculations required, it is used with the UVA “QUEUE” program.

This case is used in Darden's FY Finance course, but it would be appropriate in any course introducing firm valuation. The case examines the 2012 decision by American Greetings (AG) to repurchase shares. Students can build a simple model of the company's future cash flows and derive an implied value. Because the company is arguably in a state of maturity or decline, a discussion of steady-state economics is particularly germane.

Set in September 1992, this exercise provides teams of students the opportunity to negotiate terms of a merger between AT&T and McCaw Cellular. AT&T, one of the largest U.S. corporations, was the dominant competitor in long-distance telephone communications in the United States. McCaw was the largest competitor in the rapidly growing cellular-telephone communications industry. Prior to the negotiations, AT&T had no position in cellular communications. This case and its companion (F-1143) are designed to allow students to be assigned roles to play. The case may pursue some or all of the following teaching objectives: exercising valuation skills, practicing strategic analysis, exercising bargaining skills, and illustrating practical aspects of mergers and acquisitions.

This case is one of a pair of cases used in a merger negotiation. It is designed to be used with “British Petroleum, Ltd.” (UVA-F-1263). One-half of the class prepares only the British Petroleum (BP) case, and one-half uses this case. BP and Amoco are considering a merger, and are in the process of negotiating a merger agreement. Macroeconomic assumptions, particularly forecasting future oil prices in an uncertain environment, and assumptions about Amoco's ability to reduce exploration and production costs make Amoco's future cash flows difficult to predict.

In August 2005, an investment manager of a hedge fund is considering purchasing an equity interest in a start-up biotechnology firm, Arcadian Microarray Technologies, Inc. The asking price is $40 million for a 60 percent equity interest. Managers of the firm are optimistic about the firm's future performance; the investment manager is more conservative in his expectations. He calls on the help of an analyst with her firm to fashion a counterproposal to Arcadian's management. The tasks for the student are to apply the concept of terminal value, interpret completed analyses and data, and derive implications of different terminal-value assumptions in an effort to recommend a counterproposal. Very little numerical figure-work is required of the student.

A new CEO from outside the firm takes over following the sudden death of the former CEO. Included in the new CEO's inbox are pressing decisions concerning (1) the firm's financing needs, (2) capital equipment, and (3) a general assessment of the firm's financial performance. The task for the student is to analyze these issues and recommend action.

The case examines one of the most significant infrastructure projects in southeastern Europe during a time when the legal and financial environment for project financing was in its infancy (early to mid-1990s). Athens needed a ring road to support its bid to host the 2004 Olympic Games. The road was technically—as well as logistically—complex, involving 33 municipalities and construction that involved a major metropolitan area (Athens) populated by more than 3.5 million inhabitants. The case examines the economics of the project, how private-public partnerships (PPPs) are structured, and the broader field of infrastructure finance.