A team of three MBA students from National Chengchi University have won first place in the 2008 L'Oreal e-Strat Challenge, an annual international online business strategy competition in Paris, marking the first time Taiwan's team has won the top prize.
The competition, one of the world’s biggest online business contests, is open to undergraduate and MBA students.
Participating teams are required to propose business plans to tackle diverse yet realistic marketing needs and challenges that L’Oreal managers face every day.
The Taiwanese team included Ho Shao-tien (何少天), Chen Tzi-ling (陳姿伶) and Hung Wan-yu (洪琬瑜), all first-year MBA students.
The key to the trio’s victory lay in their presentation of a clear-cut strategy for their virtual company’s sustainable and diversified development, in line with the world trend of business operations, the judges said.
In addition to strong strategy, the trio also presented a set of operating and management guidelines on protecting employee welfare, improving working conditions and defending principles of fairness, the judges added.
“The good score is considered a great encouragement for Taiwan’s students who are working hard, and proves Taiwan has a rich pool of talent,” said Alvin Michael Hew, managing director of L’Oreal Taiwan.
This year, the competition brought together more than 44,000 teams from 110 countries. Teams were asked to make critical decisions about all aspects of their fictitious company, including pricing, production volume and capacity, research and development, financial management, marketing, advertising and brand positioning.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by