Product Overview

After a period of poor stock-market performance, conglomerate Chestnut Foods (Chestnut) faces the acquisition of its stock by an activist investor. The new investor demands the sale of Chestnut’s high-growth division, which contrasts with the CFO’s turnaround plan to expand this same division. To disentangle the way forward for Chestnut, students are invited to grapple with the risk-adjusted performance of each division and the estimation of division-specific hurdle rates. Students learn to appreciate the importance of using risk-adjusted hurdle rates in establishing appropriate investment policy. This B case is typically taught after having discussed the A case (UVA-F-1736), but this is not necessary. At the Darden School of Business, they are taught in separate years, as independent cases, and the A case has a separate teaching note (UVA-F-1736TN). The B case is set one month after the A case and focuses on the performance of product groups within Chestnut’s poorly performing Instruments division. The case is designed as an opportunity to hone skills in performance evaluation.

Learning Objectives

The case seeks to meet the following teaching objectives: (1) Examine metrics of financial performance evaluation, including ratio analysis. (2) Build appreciation for the importance of attributing capital usage to business performance. (3) Review the methods and challenges of estimating risk-based hurdle rates. (4) Generate intuition for measures of economic profit for business units.