The third edition of the IESE Private Equity Competition (IPEC) was held on April 19 on IESE’s Barcelona campus. This is the first time the competition, which is set up and organized entirely by IESE MBA students, was open to teams from other top European business schools.
Apart from IESE, this year’s participants were HEC Business School, INSEAD Business School, IE Business School and London Business School. Teams were selected by each school through an internal selection round. In the coming years the IPEC would strive to include participation from more schools.
The IPEC is unique in Europe as it replicates the "true-to-life" experience of a PE investment analyst, giving participants a unique insight into the buyout process. Teams of 5 from each participating business school acted in the role of a private equity fund – working on a real life MBO transaction, with the original transaction documents and alongside the actual persons involved in the deal, giving an exceptional level of authenticity to their task.
Each team first had negotiations with judges acting as the Investment Committee, the Lending Bank and the target Management Team. Thereafter, they had to present their investment proposal to a panel of top judges, which included Fernando Garcia Ferrer (Partner and Head of Markets & PE, KPMG), Marcus Brennecke (Head of EQT Equity in Germany), Chris Wildmoser (Partner, CVC), Marco Sebold (Director, Change Capital Partners), Norbert Steinke (CEO, Hallhuber), Beatriz Gonzalez García-Marqués (Senior Manager, KPMG), Sertac Yener (Director Project Development, Al Nowais Investments), Ammar Al-Rikabi (VP, Arch Investment Partners Limited), Magdalena Markiewicz (Senior Associate, Rothschild) and Carlos Robles (AD, The Carlyle Group).
As well as learning about the strategic and financial considerations of an investment, participants also got the chance to network with top private equity professionals. The judges were very impressed by the high quality of teams while the students benefitted appreciated the real-time feedback and the learning experince.
IESE Business School (Leonce Ano, Diego De Paula, Pietro Ceresa, Jakub Dzik and Luca Salvatore Marzano) won the IESE Private Equity Competition 2013. They were praised by the judges for their thoroughness and consideration of most of the key aspects in the deal. INSEAD Business School (Ghaleb Samara, Tarek Hegazy, Toby Chang, Yeshwant Holkar and Shehryar Kamruddin) was the runner up, with London Business School (Vladi Atanassov, Bernardo Cioni, Bill Hutchinson, Ruslan Mahhov and James Robinson) taking third place. The IPEC was organised by IESE students – Dumitru Furtuna, Stefano Charrey and Varun Dalal under the invaluable mentorship of Prof. Heinrich Liechtenstein. KPMG and Ermenegildo Zegna sponsored the event.