Informal Business School team takes Danish finance competition by storm
Alexis Orsmond, Chloe Segal and Zac Segal
The annual competition is restricted to Scandinavian universities, but the locally enrolled exchange students, Chloe Segal, Alexis Orsmond and Zac Segal quickly become known informally as 'the Sydney team'.
"We were introduced as the team that fought kangaroos to the sound of Men at Work's 'Land Down Under'," said Chloe.
We were proud to be representing Australia in front of the heads of Danish investment banks, private equity directors, legal partners and an entire auditorium of Danes.
The case required the team to plan the sale and to develop a five-year exit strategy of a private equity portfolio company, Active Brands.
The plan had to consider exit route, holding horizon and buyers, the value of the company, a process timeline, risks and regulatory and legal matters.
Chloe described the competition as "very different" to those that the Sydney team had experienced at home.
"Most of the case competitions in Australia allow a week or months of preparation time, but for this competition we had just 48 hours to submit our solution," she said. "We then had three hours between the semifinals and finals to incorporate judges' feedback and to add 5 minutes to our presentation."
More than 50 teams took part in the competition, with nine advancing to the semi-finals and three, including the Sydney team, advancing to the finals.
In the end, the Sydney side, the only 'foreign' team to make the finals, was beaten by the local favorites, the Copenhagen University Business School, but, said Chloe, "it was exciting to be given the opportunity to share the knowledge we had learned at an Australian business school and to be able to experience a different type of case competition."
"Our success is largely a factor of the University of Sydney Business School's support for student engagement in case competitions and societies which offer training to assist in building presentation skills," Chloe concluded.
Chloe is currently completing a Bachelor of Commerce (Liberal Studies) at the University of Copenhagen, Alexis is completing a Commerce/Law degree at the University of Copenhagen, and Zac is completing a Bachelor of Commerce at Copenhagen Business School.
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