All cases
November 2023
Royal Ahold: International growth and acquisitions
By Freek Vermeulen
On October 13 2004, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud and other charges in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against Royal Ahold and three former top executives, including CEO and Chairman Cees van der Hoeven, thus terminating the career of the once-power...
November 2023
AntChain’s Blockchain as a Service: Digitising Industry Collaboration
By S. Alex Yang, Nitish Jain
The case describes how AntChain’s parent, Ant Group, started to invest in blockchain in 2015 as it believed the technology would build trust between different actors in a system. The earliest use case was a cross-border remittance service. The team continued to build and develop its blockchain tec...
November 2023
Lark & Berry: The diamond disruptors
By Ioannis Ioannou, Nick Mickshik
Laura Chavez was delighted beyond words when the Atelier Asymmetric Bow suite, designed by her luxury jewellery company Lark & Berry, won the 2019 Goldsmiths’ Craft and Design Council Graff jewellery award. The Graff Award was the jewellery industry’s equivalent of the Oscars award for Best ...
October 2023
Insearch Ltd: Searching for a company to buy
By Simon Webster
By March 2022 Steve Webb had spent more than three years looking for a company to acquire. He was in final negotiations to buy a company, but he and the vendors did not see eye-to-eye on its valuation. Steve was also concerned about how to structure an offer. He was in a difficult financial situatio...
September 2023
Desso (B): Going Forward (Portuguese language)
By Ioannis Ioannou, Amandine Ody-Brasier
This is part of a case series. This case describes the strategic transformation of DESSO, a Dutch manufacturer of carpet tiles and flooring solutions. The first part of the case describes the difficult situation in which the company found itself in the early 2000s, following a series of changes in o...