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After completion of the case study, students will be able to examine the financial implications of Maghreb Steel’s substantial investment in the Blad Assolb complex in 2007 within the restructuring plan; explore how this decision influenced the company’s financial health and strategic position in the steel market, within the context of the restructuring plan; assess the impact of the 2008 economic crisis within the restructuring plan; analyze how the crisis affected the company’s pricing strategies, profitability and overall business strategy; investigate the financial and strategic consequences of the hot rolling activity initiated as a result of the Blad Assolb project within the company’s restructuring plan; and critique how this venture impacted the company’s operations, cost structure and competitiveness in the steel industry, aligned with the restructuring plan.

This case study deals with the only flat steel producer in Morocco: Maghreb Steel, the Moroccan family-owned company created in 1975 by the Sekkat family. It was a leading steel company. At the beginning, the company was specialized in the field of steel tubes, but thanks to its growth ambitions, the Sekkat family had made Maghreb Steel a major player in the Moroccan steel sector. In the same logic of development, the top management of Maghreb Steel launched in 2007 in the adventure to create the first production complex of cold rolling in Morocco – an investment that pushed Maghreb Steel to resort to a debt of more than 6bn dirhams (DH) with a consortium of six banks and would have allowed the company a huge leap in growth, except that the decision-makers of the group Sekkat could not see coming the economic crisis of 2008 causing the fall of steel prices by 62% compared to 2007. Thus, from its effective launch in 2010, the activity of hot rolling would become, for the company, a regrettable orientation. Moreover, the national market could not absorb all the production of the complex that the company called Blad Assolb. In response to this difficult situation, Maghreb Steel decided to store its goods to avoid selling at a loss. Faced with this situation of sectoral crisis and deterioration of its activity, Maghreb Steel lost its ability to honor its financial commitments with the banking consortium. From then on, the company became a case of failure, and the recovery measures had not ceased to be duplicated by the various stakeholders: State, Sekkat family, creditors and management of the company, having only one objective in mind: Save Maghreb Steel! This said, the present case study is dedicated to the financial and strategic analysis of the current situation and the evolution of the company throughout the crisis period to finally propose a suitable recovery plan to save Maghreb Steel.

The case study can be taught to students of master’s degrees in financial management as a synthesis of finance courses. It can also be used to train executives and managers working in family businesses as part of professional certification training.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 1: Accounting and finance.

Since the end of the 1990s, the Algerian public authorities have implemented research and innovation policies in order to build a solid National Innovation System (NIS) and improve industrial and economic performance. Today, the NIS remains immature, which hinders the learning and innovation processes. Our objective here is to analyze under a broad vision the Algerian NIS by examining its various components, to evaluate the capacities of training and innovation, and to measure the production of the innovation and the economic performances. Our research question is the following: How could the Algerian public authorities build a solid NIS in order to improve economic performance? To answer this question, we use a research methodology that mobilizes three types of complementary indicators in order to analyze the processes of learning and innovation from a systemic and interactive perspective. We also use economic performance indicators in order to put the analysis into a broader perspective. At the end, we propose action policies in favor of the construction of a complete Algerian NIS to improve economic performance.

This study aims to examine the interrelationship between financial stability and economic growth with a comprehensive analysis.

The panel Granger causality testing approach is carried out to the panels of the Fragile Five (F5) and the Group of Seven (G7) countries for the period 1998–2020. To capture the different aspects of financial stability the authors use eight different indicators.

The findings reveal some important implications: the relationship between financial stability and economic growth is sensitive to the financial stability indicators for both the F5 and G7 countries. The stability indicators related to the credit market contain much more causality relationship with economic growth than the indicators related to the stock market. Z-score and provisions to nonperforming loans (NPLs) are among the two variables with the highest causality relationship with economic growth. The least number of causality link is found for the Regulatory Capital Ratio and Stock Price Volatility in F5 countries and Credit Ratio, NPLs and Stock Price Volatility in G7 countries. Economic growth affects financial stability through credit market stability indicators and mostly for the F5 countries. No causal relationship is found for any of the financial stability indicators of Canada, the UK and the USA from economic growth to financial stability.

Since the linkages between financial stability and economic growth may vary due to country/group specific differences, apart from the previous studies, the authors select two different groups of countries in terms of financial stability and economic size.

The purpose of this research is to study the impact of talent management practices on organizational resilience in Tunisian firms in times of the sanitary crises due to COVID-19.

A hypothetico-deductive approach is adopted. First, it is hypothesized that four talent management practices positively affect organizational resilience. Then, the hypotheses were tested by using quantitative methods. Data were collected through questionnaires and analyzed with PLS-SEM techniques.

Results show that talent identification positively affects organizational resilience operationalized through the three dimensions of agility, integrity and robustness. Talent development and talent succession planning positively influence the firms' agility only, whilst talent retention had no effect on the three organizational resilience dimensions.

The findings of this research may be helpful for human resources managers to recognize among talent management practices those that are mostly associated with organizational resilience and its dimensions. This could help them revise some talent management practices and implement those that are lacking to ensure strong and resilient firms, especially in a context characterized by the occurrence of crises of different natures.

The literature review showed that talent management practices and organizational resilience relationships are understudied. This research empirically highlights the relevance of the linkage between them. It contributes to the rare existent works by identifying a significant effect of talent identification on all organizational resilience dimensions and a positive effect of talent development and succession planning on agility.

Although recent literature has examined diverse measures adopted by SMEs to navigate the COVID-19 turbulence, there is a shortage of evidence on how crisis-time strategy creation behaviour and digitalization activities increase (1) sales and (2) cash flow. Thus, predicated on a novel strategy creation perspective, this inquiry aims to investigate the crisis behaviour, sales and cash flow performance of 528 SMEs in Morocco.

Novel links between (1) aggregate wage cuts, (2) variable operating hours, (3) deferred payment to suppliers, (4) deferred payment to tax authorities and (5) sales performance are developed and tested. A further link between sales performance and cash flow is also examined and the analysis is conducted using a non-linear structural equation modelling technique.

While there is a significant association between strategy creation behaviours and sales performance, only variable operating hours have a positive effect. Also, sales performance increases cash flow and this relationship is substantially strengthened by e-commerce digitalization and innovation.

Theoretically, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first inquiries to espouse the strategy creation view to explain SMEs' crisis-time behaviour and digitalization. For practical purposes, to supplement Moroccan SMEs' propensity to seek tax deferrals, it is argued that debt and equity support measures are also needed to boost sales performance and cash flow.

With the increasing complexity of public–private partnership (PPP) projects, the amount of data generated during the construction process is massive. This paper aims to develop a new information management method to cope with the risk problems involved in dealing with such data, based on domain ontologies of the construction industry, to help manage PPP risks, share and reuse risk knowledge.

Risk knowledge concepts are acquired and summarized through PPP failure cases and an extensive literature review to establish a domain framework for risk knowledge using ontology technology to help manage PPP risks.

The results indicate that the risk ontology is capable of capturing key concepts and relationships involved in managing PPP risks and can be used to facilitate knowledge reuse and storage beneficial to risk management.

The classes in the risk knowledge ontology model constructed in this research do not yet cover all the information in PPP project risks and need to be further extended. Moreover, only the framework and basic methods needed are developed, while the construction of a working ontology model and the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge is a complicated process that requires repeated modifications and evaluations before it can be implemented.

The ontology provides a basis for turning PPP risk information into risk knowledge to allow the effective sharing and communication of project risks between different project stakeholders. It can also have the potential to help reduce the dependence on subjectivity by mining, using and storing tacit knowledge in the risk management process.

The apparent suitability of the nine classes of PPP risk knowledge (project model, risk type, risk occurrence stage, risk source, risk consequence, risk likelihood, risk carrier, risk management measures and risk case) is identified, and the proposed construction method and steps for a complete domain ontology for PPP risk management are unique. A combination of criteria- and task-based evaluations is also developed for assessing the PPP risk ontology for the first time.