News Archive

Four UWA Business School students have won second place nationwide in the 2015 UBS Investment Banking Challenge .

Isabella Blakiston, Tobias Butler, David Ellis and Thomas Smoker advised on a real-life mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transaction, impressing a panel of UBS investment bankers and academic judges.

The group first made it through a campus round, before going on to present at UBS’ Sydney office against teams from six other universities around Australia.

“When we arrived in Sydney we had a couple of hours at the UBS offices to go over our presentation,” the team recounted.

“Over this time, many of the Perth bankers who were now working at UBS in Sydney came and visited our team to talk about the competition process but also to give the team advice on how to stay calm when presenting and tips they had from when they did the challenge.

“The competition required knowledge of discounted cash flow, leveraged buyout and comparable valuation models and it was a great learning experience to develop these financial models, some of which we had never encountered before.”

The team had previously entered the Citi Stock Pitch Challenge. During the UBS competition, they spent time researching the featured transaction (Wilmar and First Pacific acquisition of Goodman Fielder) as well as UBS, and pre-empting possible questions from the judging panel.

“A combination of our university studies and our research for the competition aided us in being able to formulate answers to the judges’ questions,” the team explained.

“To students who are thinking about doing the Challenge, we would highly recommend it. It is the best way to translate the concepts learned at university to a real life scenario.

“The time sacrifice definitely pays off and the skills learned are extremely useful not just to finance but all career paths. We owe a big thank you to the UWA Business School’s Andrew Caminschi , FAWA (Finance Association of Western Australia) and the UWA Business School for all of their advice and support throughout the process.”

The team competed in the National Finals in Sydney in May this year.

Media references

Karen Della Torre (UWA Business School)                                         (+61 8) 6488 8538
Verity Chia (UWA Business School)                                                  (+61 8) 6488 1346