Question: Need to prepare a 2500 word report for a group of risk averse investors with limited knowledge (i.e. your "target audience").
The written report is to provide a recommendation as to whether the investors should buy more Virgin shares, sell their current holdings, or hold their current holdings until a later date.
Need to complete the report ONLY.
Include Strategy Analysis, Accounting Analysis, Financial Analysis and Forecasting and base the overall analysis on these.
Part 1 - Report
Scenario: You are a financial analyst and you have been hired by a group of risk averse investors with limited knowledge (i.e. your "target audience") to prepare a written report. The written report is to provide a recommendation as to whether the investors should buy more Virgin shares, sell their current holdings, or hold their current holdings until a later date.
Task: Your group is to prepare a report of no more than 2,500 words. A 10% allowance of this word limit is allowed to acknowledge the inclusion of in-text references and appendices - note: appendices are for the reader's/marker's reference and do not provide additional marks, however lack of appendices may result in lower marks. The word limit excludes the executive summary which itself should not exceed 250 words.
Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to test students' ability to scope, synthesise and evaluate information for investors' decision making. It asks students to appreciate the context and operations of a real company. Students will need to thoroughly research and reference their work including all company reports that have been used. In general, attention must be given to not only summarising ‘facts' about the case study company (and competitors), but critically analysing past performance, current trends and forming strongly reasoned recommendations for investment decision making. Quality of arguments, the way information is used to justify evaluations, and the soundness (viability) of recommendations for the target audience will be important for scoring higher marks.
Analysis and recommendations: In preparing your recommendation, you can use any of the analytical approaches/tools/methods learnt in this course. As part of developing professional judgement, and application of this judgement, students will need to evaluate which analytical approaches/tools/methods they decide to apply (or not to apply) and why.
Furthermore, the report should appraise which approaches/tools/methods produce results which are weighted more in forming recommendations to investors. As a purely hypothetical example, you may use 2 different analytical models to discuss the competitive context of Virgin Australia. However, the 2 models may yield slightly contradictory results in terms of your recommendation for investors. Therefore, as an analyst, you will need to choose which model to rely on the most in forming your opinions about the company.
Thus, this task is not about applying as many different frameworks as possible, but deciding on which best suit the analysis required to satisfy the decision making needs of the target audience. Importantly, this is an applied task, so your report should not aim to give a discourse of theory (e.g. - dedicating several paragraphs purely to defining/explaining what cost leadership or differentiation is, or purely explaining the steps in accounting analysis). You will need to synthesise your understanding of theory through your analysis of Virgin Australia.
Part 2 - Presentation
Scenario: You are a financial analyst and you have been hired by a group of risk averse investors with limited knowledge to buy more Virgin shares, sell their current holdings, or hold their current holdings until a later date.
You need to analyse each of the investors' options and provide a presentation advising which, if any, of the options the investors should follow.
Task: Your group is to prepare, and present, a 15 minute presentation addressing the above scenario. As in Part 1, as part of developing professional judgement, and application of this judgement, students need to evaluate which analytical approaches/tools/methods they decide to apply (or not to apply) and why.
Structure: Students should prepare and structure a professional presentation. Without restricting students individual style/flare, students should consider how best to deliver a professional presentation to suit the needs of the target audience.
For ACG 37 you will need to incorporate audio into your presentation. Modern versions of Microsoft PowerPoint have the capacity to record audio as part of the power point file. Some of you may choose to video tape yourselves and combine the video files together using tools such as Movie Maker or iMovie etc... Flexibility is given in terms of how you use different technologies to conduct your presentation. The important feature of all presentations is that there are visual aids and a supporting audio commentary from each student in your group that a marker can easily follow. Thus, it is important to clearly label which group member is doing each part of the presentation.