As the winners of this year’s Deloitte Consulting Undergraduate Case Competition learned, thinking "outside the continent" can be an important strategy for success. At the competition finals Feb. 7, the winning team was the only one to suggest that the case’s fictional telecommunications company invest in Africa to take advantage of the continent’s huge potential for growth.
The winning team consisted of Minh Le, BS 15 (Bus./Comp. Sci.); Amelia Park, BS 15; Ishaan Gupta, BA 16 (Econ./Educ.); and Rohit Rajkumar, BS 17 (Mole. & Cell Bio.). The team will go on to represent Haas in the Deloitte National Undergraduate Case Competition at Deloitte University in Westlake, Texas, from Feb. 27 to March 1.
Despite lacking experience in the consulting field, the team’s strategy helped it prevail over four finalists in the competition, which was open to Berkeley freshmen, sophomores, and juniors of all majors. Each team was required to have at least one student from Haas and one student from outside of Haas.
The case presented to the five teams was centered on a fictional telecommunications company but modeled on a real-life situation previously addressed by Deloitte consultants. The fictional company, called Telecom, was based in the U.S. but primarily operated in Mexico and Argentina. Students were challenged to help the company reverse a trend of declining revenues and suggest opportunities for expansion of certain products and services.
“I think the biggest thing my team got from the case was the opportunity to work closely with professionals,” says Le. “One of the neat parts of this case was that halfway through, we had a working dinner where we got to meet with Deloitte employees who work in the three different consulting fields and share our ideas with them.”