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The University of Chicago Booth School of Business team captured first place and a $5,000 prize at the Second Annual Mergers & Acquisitions Competition at the University of Maryland on October 16-17. One key to its win was using the diverse backgrounds of its members to address the mock acquisition from every perspective, said Bharat Kapoor, a member of the Chicago Booth team of four students from the Evening MBA program.
“We attacked it from various angles,” Kapoor said. “We had diverse professional experience and a diverse background in the classes we’ve taken at Chicago Booth. We were able to take many of the theories we learned in class and apply them in practice. The bottom line is, we would have taken our money and invested in the proposal. It was kind of like, ‘Put your money where your words are.’ ”
Chicago Booth’s team - Kapoor, Akash Varshney, Anne Kellman, and Dustin Lyman - topped teams from nine other schools by packaging the winning proposal for Dell to acquire Computer Science Corporation. The team worked on the project through the evening of October 16 and into the following morning., Kapoor said. Panels of 10 judges, including banking executives and representatives of event sponsor KPMG Corporate Finance, determined finalists in the first round and the winner from the two finalists, he said.
Judges said the Chicago Booth team provided a “very good quantitative presentation of what would happen” in the acquisition, team member Akash Varshney said. “We have a very quantitative mindset at Chicago Booth,” Varshney said. “That helps a lot. We are quickly able to churn out numbers and apply the quantitative method.”
“Our competitive advantage over any school in the world is fundamentals in econometrics,” Kapoor said. “It’s not just frameworks. We look at the economics behind every framework. That is what gave us the competitive advantage in this competition.”
Each member of the team was able to trust that the other members would do their jobs well, Kellman said. “I honestly don’t know how some of the research was done or whether the tax strategy we chose was an ideal one, but I trusted that those who were responsible for that did their part,” Kellman said. “I think much of that trust comes from knowing that the classes we take at Chicago Booth adequately prepare us to deal with real-life issues.”
The competition confirmed the team’s ability to work under deadline, Varshney said. “It was very close to a real-world experience,” he said. “Secondly, it was fun because it showed us how well we do under high-pressure situations. We were given a short period of time, less than 24 hours. We all had a lack of sleep. We had to be sharp and answer questions in a high-pressure situation under time constraint.”