Master of Finance students win top prize at 2019 Business Valuation Challenge

A year after earning first-runner-up honors, a team of Master of Finance students from Tulane University’s A. B. Freeman School of Business won first place at the 2019 Business Valuation Challenge. The competition, an annual presentation of Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson School of Business, took place Nov. 23 in Atlanta.

The competition challenges students to assess the stand-alone value of a real private company. Teams review a case and submit video presentations of their analysis. The top five submissions are then invited to present their presentations before judges in a live final round. In earning this year's top prize, the Freeman students — Tingting Guo (MFIN ’20), Constanta Lungu (MFIN ’20), Jashn Sardana (MFIN ’20) and Jie Zhou (MFIN ’20) — topped student teams from business schools across the country. The students worked with Assistant Professor of Finance Ryan Peters, who served as faculty adviser, to apply for the challenge and prepare for their final presentation to judges.

“These cases are about more than simply processing numbers to arrive at a correct valuation,” said Peters. “Judges are looking for an analysis that approaches the case holistically and seriously considers the perspective of hypothetical clients. In this particular case, the shareholders had very disparate goals in the context of multiple strategic opportunities. Jie, Tingting, Jashn and Constanta did a great job focusing on those goals while defending a technically robust analysis.”