GUIDELINES FOR SHAREHOLDER REPORT (WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT)
DUE DATE:
The Shareholder Report to be written for this course is a comprised version of an annual statement written by a company. Using the content from your team’s activities/logs, Capstone Couriers, and additional reports generated by Capsim, you are required to work with your teammates to submit an executive report that summarizes the company’s performance over the eight years (i.e., 8 rounds). The goal of this report is to provide a written, well-articulated description of the actions taken by your team as the top management of the company to your company’s shareholders. This report acts as a tool for you to compare your company’s performance to the industry, evaluate your company’s final standing, and provide clarification on the team’s learning outcomes. Your report contains a total of five (5) areas/topics as listed below:
1) Letter to the Shareholders or Executive Summary
2) Strategy (Corporate level, Business level and Functional level)
3) Financial Highlights (Profitability ratios, Liquidity ratios, Equity ratios, other financial proformas)
4) Lessons Learned
5) Plans for the Future
1) Letter to the Shareholders or Executive Summary
This is usually a one-page introduction that addresses the shareholders and highlights the valuable aspects of the company, its performance and its future. It also acts as a summary of the report by providing the important details of the company’s activities in a nutshell.
2) Strategy (Corporate level, Business level and Functional level)
Your report should contain descriptions of your activities at three levels of strategic management – corporate, business and functional.
– At the corporate level, your report should describe the company’s single, overarching strategy for all its product lines (e.g., cost-leadership, focused differentiator). In this section, please elaborate on the actions that your team took in relation to this overarching strategy over the course of eight years. For example, if you decided to get rid of your high-end product to pursue a cost-leadership strategy, clearly explain the “why” and “how” of this decision along with its implications.
– At the business level, your report should describe the actions taken for each product line in order to compete in that market (e.g., traditional, low-end, size). In this section, please describe briefly the steps taken to improve/revise each product line and the reason for doing so.
– At the functional level, your report should briefly describe the actions taken in each of the functional areas (e.g., R&D, Marketing, Finance, HR) over the course of eight rounds. For example, what was your general approach to production? Did you focus more on automation or on reducing labor? Did you have to buy extra capacity or sell capacity at any point? Did you incur a lot of overtime costs? Was high inventory a consistent problem for your company?
3) Financial Highlights (Profitability ratios, Liquidity ratios, Equity ratios, other financial proformas)
Your report should provide details of the financial ratios and proformas. A well-written report would also compare the company’s financial aspects with those of the closest competitor or the industry. Specifically, information on the following ratios should be provided for round 8:
– Profitability ratios: These are metrics to assess a company’s ability to generate earnings compared to its expenses and other relevant costs. Some examples of profitability ratios are profit margins, return on assets (ROA), and return on equity (ROE).
– Liquidity ratios: These are metrics that measure a company’s ability to pay its debt obligations, and include several measures such as current liabilities, liquid assets, short-term debts, working capital (i.e., difference between current assets and current liabilities), and current ratio (i.e., current assets divided by current liabilities).
– Equity ratio: The equity ratio determines how much would shareholders receive in an event of a company-wide liquidation. The ratio is expressed as a percentage, and is calculated by dividing total shareholder’s equity by total assets of the firm. Both these values are derived from the balance sheet of the company. Shareholder’s equity is calculated as total liabilities subtracted from total assets.
4) Lessons Learned
This section of the report should describe the learning outcomes for your team by managing a public stock company with multiple product lines. You can describe the major/important decisions that your team took or failed to take, which affected the company’s performance positively or negatively. For example, did you fail to add production capacity after launching a new product? What were the consequences of such failure and what did you learn? Did you repeatedly borrow a high amount of current debt instead of long-term debt or stock issue? What were the consequences of such decision and what did you learn? Did your company consistently missed its mark with sales forecast? Again, what were the implications and what did you learn?
5) Plans for the Future
The last section of your report should describe your company’s plans for future, presuming that the competition will continue and your company needs its shareholders and investors to continue investing in it. Hence, an overall focus of this section should be to answer this question – “why should the shareholders continue to invest in your company?” Your team may think of and describe several creative ways to answer this question. In this section, you should also clarify the corrective steps that the company is taking or will take to address the past failures (if any), and describe what strategic actions will be taken to continue to beat competition in the future.
BASIC CRITERIA – LENGTH & FORMAT
- There is no official minimum or maximum page limit for your report. However, please remember that this assignment is worth 100 points. Hence, a minimum of 10 pages are considered acceptable – however, that number is the “minimum”, which means that you cannot automatically expect a high score by submitting a 10-page report. Additionally, that count does not include the title page, team-details, tables/figures, logos, and/or references. Please keep your description specific, logical and professional. Once again, please remember that a minimal effort on this report will result in a minimal score – i.e., a report must be exceptional and go above and beyond the minimum requirements to deserve a full score.
- Please submit ONLY a Microsoft Word file. A PDF or similar format is not accepted for this assignment.
- A well-written report will provide comprehensive and detailed explanation of each of the 5 areas/sections, and give convincing and logical information within each area/section.
- Any redundant or irrelevant content or material in the report that is not directly applicable to the five sections mentioned earlier will be ignored for the purpose of scoring. In other words, the draft that is submitted will first be “trimmed of all the fat” by the instructor to calculate the actual number of pages that are relevant.
- Your report cannot be written in a bullet-point format. You must write full paragraphs that properly articulate your arguments and explanation. Each section must be separately explained and titled appropriately to distinguish it from other sections.
- The report must include page numbers.
- Company Name/Title/Course # must be provided on a separate page, not in the body of the report.
- Report must adopt an APA formatting style: http://www.apastyle.org/learn/quick-guide-on-formatting.aspx#Running%20head. At the least, it should be typed, double-spaced with a maximum font size of 12, maximum margins of 1 inch (upper, lower and sides), and corrected for grammar and spelling errors. These formatting requirements are for the Microsoft Word files.
- Please note that points will be deducted upon failure to adhere to these guidelines.
GRADING GUIDELINES
- Your shareholder report is worth 100 points. Each of the 5 sections is worth 20 points. Your report may fall into one of the four categories mentioned below depending on how it meets the grading guidelines:
- In the first category will be papers that meet the basic criteria AND address all 5 sections thoroughly. Particularly,
- The paper MUST be comprehensive and in the appropriate format mentioned above.
- The paper MUST cover all 5 sections mentioned above and should display a detailed and satisfactory explanation of each of those sections. The paper must display the team’s efforts in finding information and applying the concepts learned in this class. Please note that simply addressing the five areas does not automatically make a report deserving of a full score. Your report must go above and beyond those basic requirements and display excellent work. Additionally, papers falling in this category will be 1) well-articulated, 2) comprehensive, 3) logical/convincing, and 4) accurate/error-free.
- In the second category will be papers that do not meet the basic criteria OR fail to address all the sections thoroughly.
- In the third category will be papers that do not meet the basic criteria AND fail to address all the sections thoroughly.
- Finally, in the last category will be papers that do not show any effort on part of the team. The instructor reserves the right to allot 0 points to such paper depending on his subjective judgment.
- Please Note: Teams usually decide to distribute tasks (e.g., one team member writes one section). If any conflict arises in the team in relation to the report, the instructor will ask each team-member to show his/her individual work in order to resolve such conflict. As long as the team-member has completed his/her individual work satisfactorily, his/her individual grade on the report will not be affected by the team’s score.
DEADLINE & SUBMISSION CRITERIA
- Your report is due on
- You are required to submit an electronic copy of the paper. As a reminder, ONLY a Microsoft Word format will be accepted (No PDFs please).
- Please submit your paper using the submission link provided in the “Written Shareholder’s Report” folder on Blackboard.
- Only one submission per team is required.
- You may turn in your paper anytime between now and the deadline.
- Please save an electronic copy of the report/paper for your records. You may need it in case there is any problem in the submission process.
- Please DO NOT email the report to the instructor unless specifically asked to.
Finally, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
Good Luck!