The national finals of the Global Management Challenge 2021 took place online, on November 30. This year’s edition – 42nd edition – brought together 332 teams of students, executives and mixed teams (students and executives). Only eight teams reached the finals. Six teams of students and two teams of executives were challenged to take five management decisions about the fate of the company they led, each decision corresponding to a quarter of activity, and covering areas such as finance, marketing, production and human resources. The Accenture TC/ECONOM-IST team, made up of 4 Técnico students, secured third place.
The 4 Técnico MSc students were Rodrigo Ramos (Aerospace Engineering) Carina Anastácio, Laura-Jane Fernandes and Sanha de Almeida (Engineering and Management of Innovation and Entrepreneurship). “The challenge was a company that had been making a loss or small profits in previous quarters and had been taking on more debt. In an attempt to turn the situation around, it was necessary to increase the quantity of the product sold and, at the same time, the profit margin”, explains Rodrigo Ramos.
The strategy of the team was based “on producing high quality products and investing in the gowth of the company’s sales platform, including the increase in the number of distributors in each market and the increase in the number of website visitors”, says Laura-Jane Fernandes. “We have also focused on increasing our company’s production capacity in order to be able to deal with a progressive demand of our products”, she adds.
According to Carina Anastácio, “adopting a risk strategy whenever necessary was crucial to secure a place on the podium, as well as being meticulous, paying close attention to our opponents’ strategies and learning from mistakes”.
The Global Management Challenge (GMC) is organised by Expresso newspaper and SDG. The GMC was held for the first time in Portugal, in 1980. The success of the 1st edition was reason enough to move towards internationalisation. Currently, the GMC takes place in over 30 countries across Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Australia.
The Deloitte/Beiras team, made up of Economics students, was the winner of the national finals and will represent Portugal in the international finals, to be held in June 2022, in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
