McGill BCom students finalists at Citigroup International Case Competition

McGill BCom students put their management skills to the test once again in a case competition where they competed against other business students from across the world. Sponsored by Citigroup and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), the fourth annual Citigroup International Case Competition took place from October 16-20, 2006, at the HKUST campus in Hong Kong. Seventeen teams from around the globe competed on a real-life business case about an Asian firm (Cafe de Coral). The teams had only 28 hours upon receiving the case to come up with their recommendations.

McGill's team consisted of BCom students Catherine Bertheau-Mailhot, Peter Chow, Michael Gaudet and Michael Hudgin. Over the past year, the team members had all taken Richard Donovan's class "Case Analysis and Presentation." Mr. Donovan also acted as their adviser and accompanied the team to Hong Kong.

In the preliminary round, McGill competed against two Chinese universities, Tsinghua and Peking, as well as the University of Texas at Austin. Due to their exceptional performance in this first round, the McGill team moved on to the finals, competing against the University of Western Ontario (Ivey), University of California at Berkeley and the host HKUST team. All teams put in a valiant effort, and after much deliberation by the judges, the team from Ivey was eventually crowned victorious over the McGill team.

This is the third year in a row that a McGill team has made the finals at HKUST, with a win in 2005. This is truly a great accomplishment for the Desautels Faculty of Management.