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The Tata owned Coastal Gujarat Power Limited is seeking to reopen Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) with state owned distribution utilities because of increase in imported coal prices resulting from a change in Indonesian laws. The Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) has decided to provide relief through a “compensatory tariff”. This is opposed by the power purchasers. Simultaneously, another Reliance Energy owned power project is seeking relief from unprecedented change in exchange rates using the CGPL decision as a precedent. The CERC and the power purchasers have to decide what to do next.

Jeff Hotchkiss, President of the Assembly Test Division of Teradyne, Inc., the largest electronics testing company in the world, returned to the corporation where he had built his career after a three-year hiatus as CEO of a VOIP start-up. Teradyne's operation was struggling through the effects of a bad economy coupled with significant downturns in the electronics industry, and Hotchkiss encountered numerous problems specifically in the China operation, including customer dissatisfaction with service, price, and time required to implement changes. He assembled a strategic team to address these issues and to recommend and implement an accelerated turnaround in China. Students are challenged to design the turnaround plan.

Corporate finance, strategic financial management, financial innovation and financial engineering.

The case is suitable for graduate level management students.

In early April 2011, Mr Ramakrishnan, the CFO of Tata Power Ltd and members of his team were busy re-evaluating fundraising options for financing Tata Power's capital expenditure requirements, for refinancing of debt, for working capital related to current projects and for liquidity to support potential acquisition bids. The team had the task of evaluating different innovative funding options as the challenge was to strike a fine balance between maintaining the owners' equity without dilution of control and avoiding any adverse impact on credit rating that could increase the cost of capital; these constraints reduced flexibility for fund raising. Keeping in mind the global market scenario and estimating the investor appetite were factors critical to the structuring of a funding instrument.

The case will help students to be comfortable in thinking about evaluating markets, financial instruments and weigh rating considerations and regulatory constraints for taking capital structure decisions.

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

The learning outcomes of this paper is to understand the working capital finances offered by bank; comprehend application by the company, loan proposal and bank procedure for additional finance; compute, analyze and interpret financial statements of company and its peers; and assess various factors to be considered while taking loan sanctioning decisions.

Sunshine had expanded its business by starting in-house manufacturing of a few stages of production of fasteners. Sunshine was in urgent need of additional finance for working capital and had applied to Rajya Bank of India Ltd. (RBIL), requesting to enhance working capital finance limits and other changes. Ruchit Mehta, Relationship Manager of S.G. Highway Branch of RBIL have to assess this request and include his evaluations in the proposal, which he had to present to Assistant General Manager of RBIL.

MBA or related program in finance courses such as financial management, corporate finance, financial statement analysis, bank management/finance and training program on “credit management” for bank employees.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 1: Accounting and Finance

Human Resource Management

Postgraduate business students, particularly MBA students.

This case examines the working environment of Fritz Publishing, a small independent South African publishing company. Fritz Publishing was established in 1960 by Nick Fritz. After his retirement, ownership passed to his son, Martin. In 2011, Martin Fritz decided to sell the company to the Prys Group, an international publishing house headquartered in Germany. February 2011 saw the arrival of a newly appointed CEO for Fritz Publishing, Vadim Arshavin, who had already experienced excellent financial results as the head of another publishing house. In the wake of his arrival, the company experienced several changes. The case highlights the challenges at Fritz Publishing that have resulted in a growing sense of dissatisfaction. After Martin Fritz sold Fritz Publishing, the organisational culture shifted quite drastically which created challenges for managers, employees and customers alike. Employees, including some members of management, are de-motivated, disengaged and frustrated because of the leadership style and behaviour of the new CEO Vadim Arshavin and consider their psychological contracts to have been breached. The case explores factors that have helped create this situation. It considers challenges to the sustainability of the organisation given recent events including an internal employee engagement survey and feedback from key customers. The case further examines the potential dangers that toxic leadership creates within organisations and encourages discussion on ways this form of destructive leadership can be handled.

The learning objectives to be drawn from the case are: to assess the impact of leadership on organisational culture; to analyse how leadership impacts the psychological contract; to identify the cross-cultural factors at play in an emerging market organisation and to understand the way a toxic leadership style can detrimentally affect a high-performance workplace. In addition, there are further learning objectives that can be explored. These are: to examine the change process and associated challenges with the introduction of new leadership into a family-type organisational culture; to understand how breach can be avoided and/or how the psychological contract can be reconstructed.

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 6: Human Resource Management.

Students should be able to use the case study in debate apply theories relating to the subjects specified.

The case is based on a fictitious South African company going through emergency response conditions analogous with what many businesses are encountering during the COVID crisis. The protagonist is struggling with structural challenges imposed on the business by unpredictable and uncontrollable external pressures and needs to make transformative decisions which might impact the culture, organisational design and digitisation of the business.

Post-graduate general management.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS: 7 Management Science.

Recognize the interest groups of the business as stakeholders and shareholders. Understand the role of strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR) in attaining competitive advantage for the firm. Apply the techniques of financial statement analysis such as common-sized financial statements and ratio analysis. Analyze the overall financial position of the company such as its liquidity, solvency and profitability position. Evaluate the appropriateness of various CSR activities given the size of the company, its business model and financial position. Create a suitable CSR policy draft incorporating the critical elements of a CSR policy that enables the firm to operationalize it and fulfill the disclosure norms.

The management of Ball Industry Limited (BIL) had overlooked the mandatory requirement of CSR policy formulation. The company had not yet spent anything on CSR since the regulation had come into force. The company’s financial position was not healthy. Still, it fell under the regulatory clause as a borderline case and must spend 2% of its average three years’ profit on CSR activities. The company had previously ignored the requirement of formally drafting a CSR policy and deciding about the actions it might want to carry out. Now that the regulator had started sending show-cause notices to several companies who had not yet begun CSR, BIL was under immense time pressure to draft its CSR policy and initiate the relevant CSR activities. Emily, the chief operating officer of BIL, was assigned the task of preparing the blueprint of the CSR policy of the company and made it available for discussion in the upcoming meeting. The task at hand was to formulate a sound CSR policy under the constrained financial state considering its strategic planning, including the SWOT analysis, competitive environment and the overall general market and economic conditions. She submitted that rather than a vanilla CSR activity, strategic CSR would support the firm to differentiate itself from competitors. She was struggling to formulate a CSR strategy that could achieve both economic and social goals.

The case will be most suitable for use in undergraduate and graduate courses.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 1: Accounting and finance.

The subject area is strategy and business.

The case can be used for MBA students. This is equally effective in short courses meant for low-to-mid-level working executives. The case is suited for classes in strategy, general marketing, media management and family business courses.

Dainik Jagran – a vernacular daily – is the most read newspaper in India. Under the banner of Jagran Prakashan Ltd.; which is one of the leading media houses in India, the success of Dainik Jagran has been an outcome of the strategic marketing decisions taken by its founder and his successors in the post-independence era. With extensive circulation, it created a large readership base and took bold decisions to launch multi editions to its daily through a series of acquisitions, mergers and consolidations from 1975 to 2010, enabling it to step into product diversification. Readership surveys, investments in technology, advertising, regular branding events and smart phone applications are a few tools that helped. While the group has diversified into other industries, there is an underlying anxiety about the future prospects of its newspaper business. With the onslaught of online news dailies, will Dainik Jagran be able to expand and maintain its readership base using its previous business and marketing strategies? Or is it time to change strategies for businesses in the newspaper and allied media industry in India?

The study has the following outcomes: application of value chain concept in businesses serving two-sided markets; application of environmental analysis, Porter’s five forces analysis and related strategy concepts; and learning to critically approach and develop a sustainable growth strategy framework for a successful family-run newspaper business in India.

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 11: Strategy.

A senior analyst has recently completed an on-site visit to the Las Vegas properties of MGM Mirage. She must value the enterprise after her preparation of projected financial statements. Assumptions for these statements come from a combination of standard account relations delineated in the case and from specific company projections that must be gleaned from MGM's MD&A. This case introduces students to pro forma financial statements and their relevance to cash flow and earnings-based valuation. Tools relevant to spreadsheet modeling can also be introduced. The case precedes MGM's announced acquisition of Mandalay Bay Corporation in 2004.