In December 2017, the corporate vice-president of Microsoft Corporation’s Devices division was considering two options to chart a strategic course for the next few years. Since first joining Microsoft Corporation in 2004, one of the vice-president’s key roles had been to oversee the strategic direction of the personal computing hardware business. The company, which was headquartered in Washington State in the United States, had a multitude of products and services that presented both opportunities and challenges for its future. Microsoft Corporation had to decide between two project options that represented growth in different business areas in Asia Pacific. The first option was to launch new products from the company’s Surface division in the Asia Pacific market. This could be Microsoft Corporation’s opportunity to showcase its holistic devices ecosystem to prospective customers in the region. The second option was to intensify efforts to market and sell the firm’s cloud solutions. This could further differentiate Microsoft Corporation as an early mover enabling enterprises to migrate to the cloud.

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Kapap Academy Pte. Ltd. (Kapap Academy) was established in 2007, following the tragic death of the founder’s older brother, with a mission to empower everyday people to learn realistic self-defence skills. The founder and his apprentice-turned-business partner formulated a simple yet functional brand of self-defence, which they named the Modern Street Combatives method. Kapap Academy’s social mission was evident in its provision of both heavily discounted and completely free training sessions for needy and vulnerable segments of society—in particular, women who were victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault, as well as the elderly. Kapap Academy was able to sustain this social mission with a dual income stream. After its 10th-year anniversary, Kapap Academy was looking to export its brand of Modern Street Combatives overseas. This posed various challenges; in particular, whether to adopt a licensing model or a franchise arrangement. Each model had its pros and cons, but a decision had to be made.

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Hiap Hoe is a family-controlled property group, with its flagship company, Hiap Hoe Ltd., listed on the Singapore Exchange since 2003. Teo Guan Seng, the founder, involved several of his children in the business and tried to share his love and wealth with his expanding family as much as he could. However, in 2012, he found himself in the midst of a divisive family feud. Eventually, he saw no other option than to break up the family holding company, give up his ownership, resign as Chairman, and to withdraw from the group he had so painstakingly built in the course of six decades. Even worse, his family’s squabbles were widely discussed in Singapore’s newspapers, and he was personally criticized in the media and in court. …

Wells Fargo Bank (“Wells Fargo”) was once the world’s largest bank by market capitalization with a net worth of USD 301.6 billion in 2015—USD 40 billion more than J. P. Morgan Chase. It was a U.S. bank headquartered in San Francisco, California, that provided banking, mortgage, investing, credit card, insurance, and consumer and commercial financial services. In September 2016, Wells Fargo was fined USD 185 million by three government authorities for unauthorized creation of 2 million bank accounts and credit cards between May 2011 and July 2015. This incident led to the questioning of company practices as well as a public scandal. The case raises the issue of what the management did to address the fake accounts scandal and what they could have done differently. Students can also debate who should be held responsible for the fake accounts scandal.

By August 2015, Swiggy, an on-demand food delivery start-up, had been operating for almost one year in Bengaluru, India. The exponential growth of the business was expected to persist. However, Swiggy was incurring a loss, or a cash burn, on each delivery it was making. The company’s current cash reserves were also drying up, and its chief executive officer had been unsuccessful in attracting new venture capital funding to finance the cash burn estimated for the next four quarters. Swiggy must figure out how to pursue its growth without the injection of any fresh funds.

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On March 8, 2017, Singapore-based food outlet operator Kimly Limited (Kimly) announced its intention to go for an initial public offering (IPO). Through this IPO, it aimed to raise SG$43.5 million. Altogether, 173.8 million new shares would be issued at SG$0.25 per share, comprising a retail tranche of 3.8 million shares and a placement tranche of 170 million shares. The chances of successfully getting Kimly’s IPO shares were slim, given the small retail tranche. In addition, the controlling shareholder and other key shareholders were subject to lock-up periods, which would prevent a short-term overhang of the shares. These factors implied that the supply of Kimly’s shares would be scarce in the initial six months after the IPO, which could have a positive impact on the share price. A retail investor, drawn to the issue because of Kimly’s identity as a family firm, applied for the IPO and was also considering purchasing shares in the aftermarket later in March. Was this a worthwhile investment, and if so, what should this investor’s maximum price be? Should such an investor plan to sell immediately or hold for the long term?

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This exercise places the reader in the position of an investor, who, before 2017, had invested for almost 20 years. Since the financial crisis in 2008–09, this investor had stayed away from the US market. The investor’s return from the previous year stood at a mere 2 per cent. Given that many political events would likely occur in 2017, the investor hoped to revise their investment strategies at the time by developing a more internationalized portfolio. Specifically, the investor was considering how to allocate capital among the existing 10 broker-recommended exchange-traded funds traded on the Singapore stock exchange and two exchange-traded funds in alternative assets traded in the US market. The investor also needed to provide additional cash flows for the education of their two daughters from year two onward for a total of four years. The investor was also willing to reshuffle the investment portfolio to put more weights into the US market. However, before making the revised investment decision, the investor needed to consider the expected returns and risks.

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Profit-making corporations returned cash to investors through dividends or share repurchases. Market participants referred to the fraction of the profits paid to shareholders in the form of dividends as the “payout ratio.” However, a large number of firms have never paid a dividend. For instance, over the past decade, more than half of the listed firms in the United States neither paid a dividend nor repurchased shares. For example, only 20 per cent of firms on the Singapore Stock Exchange consistently paid dividends over the past decade, with similar proportions observed in both US and European stock markets. The percentage of dividend-paying firms plummeted to a record low of 17 per cent in 2000. In fact, most of the “new economy” firms such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google, reinvested their entire savings. This note describes rational dividend theories, behavioural dividend theories, and outlines the four categories of dividend strategies followed by firms.

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A new analyst has been asked to forecast the upcoming dividends for Singapore Airlines Limited. However, unlike most dividend-paying firms, which typically maintain stable, transparent, and simple dividend policies, Singapore Airlines maintained an opaque, complex, and irregular pattern of dividends. Further, the company did not respond to requests for information about expected dividends or the company’s dividend policy. The analyst decided to gather historical data about the company and its competitors to gain insights on Singapore Airlines’ dividend policy and to forecast its upcoming dividend.

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In 2017, the president of Fujitsu Asia Pte. Ltd. in Singapore, a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Fujitsu Limited (Fujitsu) needed to decide between two project options that represented growth in different industries in Asia. Both projects represented Fujitsu’s vision of connected services and could potentially be much-needed engines of new growth for Fujitsu Singapore over the next 5 to 10 years. The first option was to offer its Japanese-engineered cloud-computing platform to engage small and medium enterprises in the manufacturing industry. Given the high costs of customizing the existing platform for local use, the president wondered whether small and medium manufacturers would generate sufficient demand to justify such a costly investment. The second option was to leverage the success of Fujitsu’s intelligent agricultural cloud-computing project with the Japanese government to offer vertical farming to Singapore and other Asian cities that faced similar space constraints but valued food resilience. But was it the right time to enter the agricultural industry? The president had limited time and resources, and needed to make a decision very soon.

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