Project Assignment Guidelines
Overview
Corporate financial managers must have a business-wide perspective to successfully navigate the corporate environment. The skills you will develop in this course will support you in your future business career and set the foundation for the concepts that will be covered in the next course, Multinational Corporate Finance. Your project for FIN 330 will allow you to showcase your mastery of the varied skills a finance professional must obtain: It will require you to analyze a real-world corporation from a quantitative perspective while also investigating the challenges and decisions a manager must face.
To accomplish this, your assessment will be broken up into two separate but related projects. The first, a corporate valuation report, will focus on a U.S. corporation of your choice. You will analyze the historical financials of your chosen corporation using the provided Excel template, and estimate the value of your corporation in a brief report.
The second project is a risk management and ethical analysis that will focus on the same corporation, highlighting the management and leadership considerations and decisions required of top-level financial managers. In this written report, you will discuss ethics, corporate social responsibility, and the challenges related to attaining short-term and long-term goals.
Combined, these two projects will assess your knowledge regarding the quantitative and qualitative concepts of corporate finance and leadership.
Project I, the corporate valuation report, is due in Module Seven, and Project II, the risk management and ethical analysis, is due in Module Eight. There are no milestone submissions that directly relate to Project II. However, your reading and the related assignments in Modules Six and Seven will help support your work as it relates to your Project II submission.
In this assignment, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following course outcomes:
• Analyze the relationships between capital structure, risk, and cost of capital for informing financial decisions that can optimize the value of corporations
• Analyze challenges financial managers face regarding short-term and long-term planning for informing decision-making
• Analyze the relationship between the value of corporations and ethically and socially responsible corporate behavior for informing financial decisions
Prompt
Your risk management and ethical analysis should analyze the prevalent risks associated with your corporations, the challenges financial managers face in trying to attain short- and long-term goals, and the various considerations that must be made during financial decision making.
Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:
I. Corporate Overview: In this section, you will summarize the industry and corporate overview you created in the first part of your project. Be sure to focus on the industry trends and issues, as you will expand upon them throughout this report.
II. Risks and Challenges: In this section, you will expand on several forms of risk and explain how each impacts corporate value and decision making.
A. Describe the challenges financial managers can face regarding working capital management (WCM) in short-term planning.
B. Analyze economic and political risk in relation to your chosen corporation for potential impact on shareholder value maximization. If there are no current risks related to economics and politics facing the industry or your corporation, analyze economic and political risk in general terms, discussing how they could impact shareholder value in general.
C. Analyze industry-specific risks-such as competition, supply chains, and technological disruptions-for their potential influence on financial decision making within your chosen corporation. Provide examples to illustrate your claims.
D. Analyze company-specific challenges that could impact corporate success in the long- or short-term. These challenges may include things like access to key talent, facilities, natural resources, or patents.
III. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Ethics: In this section, you will discuss the importance and impact of corporate social responsibility and ethics in financial decision making and a corporation's value.
A. Identify the key CSR and ethical issues involving your company's major stakeholders: investors, customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and the environment.
B. Explain how the identified issues can impact the corporation's value.
C. Discuss the role that financial managers should play in monitoring and managing these issues.
D. Reflect on the importance of ethics and CSR in financial decision making, explaining reasoning.
Format your assignment according to the following formatting requirements:
1. The answer should be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
2. The response also include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
3. Also Include a reference page. The Citations and references should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.