Rutgers wins first place in J& J National Case Competition

Seven Rutgers Business School-New Brunswick undergraduates were the first-place winners in the Johnson & Johnson National Case Competition.

The virtual competition required the teams to create a business plan detailing how they would make a fictional company’s acquisition of a Japanese cosmetic company successful, allowing the acquiring company to break into the Asian-Pacific market.

Junior Rishi Panda said the competition allowed the students to apply some of their corporate finance lessons and offered them a chance to learn more about merger and acquisitions as well as Johnson & Johnson, one of the world’s largest healthcare companies.

“I learned a lot from this case competition,” he said. “It was a great hands-on experience.”

Panda said he was already putting together a team of students for the Johnson & Johnson competition when a friend, Raymond Qian, asked him if he was interested in participating. “I know you like case competitions,” Qian told Panda.

What resulted was a team of seven made up of Panda, Qian, Audrey Hua, Melissa Kwong, Soomin Ham, Daren Wang and Ellen Xu. “We set some ground rules and took off running,” Panda said.

Three of the team members are finance majors, giving them an ability to understand some of the data they were given and using it to their advantage. One of the students, who gained presentation skills during her internship, was able to design slides that were easy to understand, Panda said.

  He estimated that the team spent more than 40 hours working on the case, including meeting daily leading up to the finals as they tried to refine their presentation.

“I felt we knocked it out of the park,” Panda said of the team’s final presentation. “Everyone was on top of their game.”

The team was the top-winner during a preliminary round among other 12 teams of students at Rutgers Business School-New Brunswick. In the final round, they finished ahead of second-prize winner Penn State and Lehigh and Rider universities, which tied for third.

The team won $3,000 for winning the final round. It will also receive $2,000 for winning being the top winner in the preliminary campus round.

A team of undergraduates from RBS-Newark – Soga Sheikh, Haseeb Malik, Matthew Me, Yug Devang Meghani and Theresa Parson – also competed in the final round. Although the team did not win, they received praise from the judges, including the following: “strong presentation…great job of integrating financial metrics into the decision-making process.” The RBS-Newark students were advised by Professor Jerry Flynn.

John Longo, a professor of professional practice in finance who advised the RBS-New Brunswick team, said the seven students demonstrated the Rutgers Business School brand – Resilient, Resourceful, Responsible and Reinvent – during the course of the competition.

“What impressed me most about the team was its relentless desire to improve,” Longo said. “The team constructively took feedback during the practice sessions and preliminary rounds in order to create casework that was markedly better at each iteration.”

“Ultimately,” he said, “their work was validated by winning the case competition at the national level.”

Teams from business schools at Villanova, Ohio State, Cornell and Southern California also competed in the final round of the competition.