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The purpose of this paper is to share the perspective of CEO and Vice Chairman of Hexaware Technologies, P.R. Chandrasekar, while exploring the question, “Does South Asia matter?”

The paper followed an interview format and utilized P.R. Chandrasekar's responses to guide and inform the discussion on South Asia.

This paper found that South Asia does matter, and always has.

This paper offers the perspective of a CEO of a multinational corporation with global experience and vast knowledge of the South Asian region. His first‐hand experiences add much value to the discussion on South Asia.

To appraise the product positioning in an emerging market. To recognize and discuss a positioning plan for a new product. To apply, describe the Kapferer brand identity prism along with different competition levels for Kingfisher Ultra Max. To deliberate the marketing mix for improving the sales of Kingfisher Ultra Max.

United Breweries Limited (UBL) was part of UB Group, which was a business conglomerate. United Breweries Holdings Limited or UB Group was headquartered at UB City, Bangalore, India. It dealt in many businesses, out of which UBL was one of them. Kingfisher Ultra Max was Kingfisher’s newest addition to the super-premium strong beer segment. It was a larger-based beer with 8% alcohol by volume content and was stronger in terms of alcohol content than Kingfisher Ultra, which was also from the super-premium segment. This brands positioning was such that it targeted the premium segment. The top management was considering a change in positioning for their Ultra Max brand. A research report submitted by a premier business school also recommended a change in positioning. The officials in the meeting are contemplating the two options for the shift in positioning; one is to make the change of positioning across India and the other is to make the change specific to some states.

The case is targeted at students of post-graduation and under-graduation programs in business administration, specializing in marketing management, brand management or marketing strategy. Also, the case study can be included as part of courses related to strategic management and competitive analysis.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 8: Marketing.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

The learning outcomes of this study are as follows:1. Learn to analyze a hostile takeover bid from the perspectives of the acquirer, target firm’s management and a large institutional investor in the target firm.2. Review the structuring, financing, valuation, mode of consideration, legal and regulatory aspects of a hostile takeover.3. Understand the role of the target firm’s board in a hostile takeover transaction.4. Address “to sell or not to sell” dilemma of a large institutional investor in the target firm in the event of a tender offer given financial and non-financial considerations.

On June 14, 2019, Pulak Prasad, Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Nalanda Capital, in consultation with other managing partners at Nalanda Capital, had to decide whether to tender a 10.6% equity holding in Mindtree Ltd. in an unsolicited open offer made by Larsen and Toubro (L&T) Ltd. Until then, Nalanda Capital, led by Prasad, had aligned with the Mindtree founders and had led a campaign to thwart L&T’s bid to acquire Mindtree; L&T’s offer to acquire 31% of Mindtree shares was because of open on June 17, 2019 and it is time for Prasad and the management team to take a reasoned call – whether to stay in Mindtree or to exit? Associated aspects included – What could be the consequences of not selling the stake? What could be L&T’s game plan? Could Mindtree continue to create wealth for its shareholders under L&T?

This case is appropriate for Mergers & Acquisitions and Strategic Financial Management courses in modules focused on structuring, financing and takeover defence techniques in a hostile takeover transaction. The case is appropriate for graduate MBA and EMBA programmes.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 1: Accounting and Finance.

The purpose of this paper is to logically establish a Non – IT ERP solution for small and medium scale industry which is based on improvement of operational efficiencies and not on ERP implementation. Today's buzzword ERP is not the right fit everywhere. The medium and small segment has many failure stories and causes of dissatisfaction. There are two schools of thought prevailing in this segment of industry. One school of thought is for big investment for ERP. The other school of thought is not to invest in ERP. This paper further strengthens the second school of thought with valid logic and real life case examples.

The design and approach is to logically establish the unacceptability of ERP solution in small segment through industry analysis and ROI analysis and to develop a model for improvement of supply chain efficiency using linear programming and Wagner Whitin algorithm.

A Non IT ERP solution for a segment of industry whose turnover is less than 2.5 M USD (in Indian perspective) which is completely based on standard operating procedure. The benefit of this model has been evaluated logically.

A real substitute of ERP system has been conceptualized in this research paper through improvement in standard operating procedure.

This research recognizes the importance of the founding conditions of a firm. A new construct, Founding Time (FT) has been conceptualized, measured, and validated to represent one of the founding conditions of a firm. FT is then used to understand the phenomena of growth of firms.

The impact of FT on the growth of a firm has been examined. This examination reveals that there is a certain zone of FT, which seems to result in high firm growth rates. This research also establishes that there is an optimum for the FT of a firm.

A multimethod approach has been used which includes econometric modeling and case studies. This approach has allowed us to triangulate the results of FT in this research.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the existing literature on financial risk disclosure by examining a sample of non-financial Indian companies listed on the Bombay stock exchange (BSE) to explore the degree of information about financial risks contained in their annual reports.

To study the financial risk disclosure of Indian companies, a sample of 206 non-financial companies has been derived from the top 500 listed companies at BSE. The method used in this study to analyze risk disclosure is content analysis. A total of 1,854 annual reports are scanned through software Nvivo-12 to find different types of risk words. Overall, risk disclosure, category wise risk disclosure, year-wise risk disclosure and sector-wise risk disclosure are assessed. The risk disclosure index is also computed.

The results show that there are some risk disclosure practices in Indian companies. No general pattern is observed. Companies are following vague method of risk disclosure. In the true sense, Indian companies are now started risk disclosure practices since 2018. This may be because of pressure from regulating bodies and stakeholders with greater detail about their financial risks.

This study is carried out for Indian non-financial companies. The paper adds to the literature relating to financial risk disclosure in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to study the status and trend of intellectual capital disclosures by selected companies in India. Three categories of intellectual capital disclosures across six industry groups were measured. The relation of the three categories of disclosures, i.e. human capital, relational capital and structural capital disclosures with the measures of organisational performance such as sales, R&D, R&D intensity, net profit and export intensity has also been studied.

Based on National Industrial Classification 2008, six sectors, namely pharmaceutical, basic metals, industrial manufacturing, energy, financial services and information technology were included in the study and 20 companies were selected from each sector based on the availability of data from 2004-2005 to 2013-2014, thus, making a sample of 1,200 firm-years. For collecting the data, a list of keywords related to various dimensions of intellectual capital was prepared and the count of keywords was searched in the annual reports of the companies.

Significant and positive trend coefficients were found in the majority of the sectors. Analysis revealed that trend coefficients differed across various sectors indicating the presence of sector specificity. Results of trend analysis reveal that structural capital-related disclosures have stagnated in case of pharmaceutical sector after hitting the peak. Significant variations were found across sectors in terms of all three types of intellectual capital disclosures. Results of study empirically support the fact that intellectual capital disclosures tend to increase with size of the organisation.

As data have been collected from annual reports of the companies, the accuracy of the findings is limited to the accuracy of the reported data.

The study is an original piece of work. This study provides an insight into the disclosure trend of intellectual capital in an emerging economy.

The case on Moodcafe captures the journey of the start-up and its entrepreneurs from the beginning till the fund-raising stage. The case brings forth critical decisions that each entrepreneur or the team of co-founders have to address during their start-up journey. This short case gives opportunity to delve into two aspects mainly a) As a founder, which investor should one choose for seeking funds and what should be the terms and conditions of investment? and b) How can one review and assess the business model of a start-up?

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a scale for measuring value progress in outsourcing organizations. The scale is also intended to capture the differences in the nature of progress between different categories of outsourcing organizations.

The procedure for developing measures suggested by Churchill was adopted. The balanced scorecard framework has been used to generate items. Data were collected from 693 employees in 49 outsourcing organizations in India (specifically, those categorized as knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and business process outsourcing (BPO)) and the scale reliability and validity was tested using content validity, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and co‐efficient alpha scores. Confirmatory fit indices have been used to establish validity and unidimensionality of the measures.

The study statistically establishes a tool to measure progress of outsourcing organizations. The findings reveal that some organizations progress horizontally through size expansion and some others adopt a vertical progress through customization and domain expertise. However, these progress directions (horizontal and vertical), contrary to industry view and this paper's hypothesis, are not commensurate with the KPO and BPO classifications.

Apart from using this tool to measure the impact of intangible assets/interventions, future longitudinal research can examine the patterns in the direction of progress across industries/countries.

Individual outsourcing organizations can use this tool to identify their current progress direction and the areas to focus for the desired progress direction.

A scale to capture the direction of progress defined through logical and conceptual bases, done in this study, is the first of its kind in the outsourcing context.

To explore building blocks of corporate value creation that can be effectively assembled by practicing managers to deconstruct corporate value creation into distinctive models (customer value creation and shareholder value creation) and stages (resource assembly and capability leverage) in the Indian Information Technology enabled Service (ITeS) industry for exploring efficiency differentials between large Indian ITeS companies.

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique has been used to uncover efficiency differentials in large Indian ITeS companies that represent 90% of all the ITeS companies listed in the Indian stock market and 13.9% of all companies listed in the Indian stock market, across industries.

This paper documents a nuanced understanding of interrelationships among activities that influence corporate value creation and comprehensively highlight those dominant activities that contribute to corporate value creation in an ITeS industry setting. The study demonstrates as to how companies can become more efficient in such crucial value creating components that result in superior corporate value. The explicating methodology proposed in this study can be handy for managers and can be extrapolated to other industry and national settings as well.

Deconstructing corporate value creation into granular models, customer value creation and shareholder value creation and further into two stages, being assembling resources to create capabilities and leveraging such capabilities to deliver value, this study provides hands-on value for managers in ITeS companies to create value.

Fusing the value creation and appropriation (VCA) framework, the resource-based view (RBV) and its extensions, this paper builds a robust theoretical model specification that is empirically tested.