Poon, Lok Sun (Wesley) is a first-year student in the BBA Economics program. He was one of four team members of team Ace Advisory, which was named the First Runner-up in the Hong Kong Joint University Case Competition (HKJUCC) in 2022. We talked with Wesley to find out about his experience in the competition, and his takeaway from it.

How would you describe your experience in the case competition?

The case competition is an intensive yet rewarding experience. In 48 hours, our team needed to come up with a detailed plan for Xiaomi’s future development. We dedicated time to researching the smartphone market and consumer electronics market to ensure our ideas fill the gap in the market. Then we stayed up late at night to ensure our ideas are logical and could be properly conveyed in the PowerPoint deck. We presented on the third day and proceeded into the final with another HKUST team.  We pitched our ideas in front of 4 prestigious professors including Prof. Kristiaan of HKUST and were awarded the first runner-up.

Can you tell us how the ideas came together within the team?

All of our team members are from HKUST Case Analysis Team and we sincerely are grateful for the support from HKUST as well as our seniors who provided training on the weekends, 4 intensive pieces of training before the competition as well as regular training case cracking and presentation skills and so much more.

The team is formed with three Year 2 students (from the GBUS program) and one Year 1 student, which is me. It is an incredible process when we first get to work with each other in February over the screening process. I learned a lot from my peers over their attention to detail as well as their broad industry knowledge and more.

What do you think has made the difference and qualified your team as the First Runner-up?

I think we come up with a solid market acquisition plan for Xiaomi in the Indian market on IoT products using their current industry-leading market share on smartphones. We have made detailed recommendations on why Xiaomi should do it and how Xiaomi could do it. We further validate our ideas with financial modeling and market sizing.

Our efforts in creating a vast amount of appendix explanation slides allow us to be well-prepared for the question-and-answer sessions to clearly explain our ideas to the judges.

What is your main takeaway from this competition?

The case competition has allowed me to have more appreciation of the impact of globalization on bringing down the cost of manufacturing, our geopolitics affected companies' decisions on manufacturing as well as how highly competitive the smartphone market has. My view of the world has been broadening, both during the case competition and during training. I spend more time on newspapers like Wall Street Journal to better understand the business world. Because of doing case competition, I believe I would want to embark on a journey in management consulting. I will look into the world of companies with unique perspectives and frameworks.