ICON Part III

Since this event wanted to test an individual in all dimensions of management, an absolutely new event was in store for us. Forgot to mention, that finally only 5 B-Schools could make it. ISB and IIM-B were not present due to other commitments back in campus.

This round was the "Private Equity Round". Here, we were made into 5 team of 2 people each, randomly made by the organisers. I teamed up with a person from XLRI. The task was follows - we had a virtual sum of USD 2 Billion. And we were given a list of 15 real companies, mostly from emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Each team had to analyse each and every company and create a private equity investment pitch in 5 hours (10 pm to 3am). We had an option of investing in none, 1 or any number of companies, even all! 3 am deadline was o do analysis and make a proper presentation which the team would be presenting in front of external judges the following morning. Only resource available was the omnipresent internet but no chats allowed et al.

In our team, we split the task of analysing the companies. My partner took 8 companies and I took 7 companies for analysis. We set aside 2 hours for self due-diligence of all the companies assigned to this. This involved going through balance sheet, profit and loss accounts, industry in general, policies in that country etc. If the company was not listed, then I worked on the limited data available. Some of the companies had not even started commercial operations like Virgin Galactic. It was really difficult to analyse such companies with no data whatsoever and on top of that limited finance knowledge.

After 2 hours were over, we exchanged our views on which companies to invest in. We segregated companies according to risk and return they offered. After discussion for hour and a half, we finally ended up deciding to invest in 4 companies. Also, we took care that our portfolio was quite diversified in terms of risk and return - one company was high on both parameters, another was medium risk high return, third one medium on both and the last one giving medium returns with low risks. "Low","medium" and "high" were quantitative percentages attached to each category based on analysis and self-set cut-offs.

With only around 75 minutes left, we had a full ppt to make. Starting from our approach, to industry analysis of each company selected, to analysis of each company; everything had to be covered and that too for a 15 minute ppt. Its really not to easy to compress 4 hours effort in a 15 minute ppt. Well, we thought that we did a pretty decent and neat job.

After hectic day, I hit the bed at around 5 am and had to get up by 8 to be ready in time for the next day activities. Upon reaching the venue, we came that one of the guys has backed out from the ICON event owing to bad health. But his team mate was still there and was ready to give presentation alone. The show must go on as they say!

The judges came and each team had their efforts ready in form of ppts. 15 minute ppt was followed by 10 minute Q&A session by the judges and other teams if time permitted. In our ppt, my team mate started first and ate up 9 minutes instead of planned 6 minutes and there was heavy penalty for overshooting the time limit. When I took over, I went in with full throttle, trying to rush through some of the parts of the slides and made sure that our analysis part got the requisite airtime. We handled Q&A in the best possible manner and both of us came out really satisfied.

After all the ppts were done, it was result time and our team WON this event! Not a bad start to the morning :) :)

Here, we were given ICON sweatshirts which were compulsory for the next round. We were given food coupons for lunch in the stalls inside the FMS campus. It was great to eat Delhi delicacies after such a long time.

In the end, I thought corporate finance is not that tough also ;)