INDIVIDUAL CASE ANALYSIS

INDIVIDUAL CASE ANALYSIS

Order Description

The case outlines the debate over the value of Facebook in the weeks prior to Facebook’s IPO on May 15, 2012. The focus of the case is on how strategic analysis of Facebook can provide a foundation for determining, or assessing, how much Facebook is worth. The key question that the case poses is: Given an IPO price of $34-$38, is Facebook a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” or is it “muppet bait”? (Please do not assume that investors knew how the stock price of Facebook would change between 2012 and now. They didn’t and couldn’t know! So, you cannot use a simple stock chart of Facebook from 2012 to 2015 to answer this question. Instead, you need to use this case to demonstrate your reasoning skills about assessing strategy, corporate performance, and firm value at a given point in time—without knowledge of the future.)

Based on the case and your own research, how would you describe and analyse Facebook’s strategy and its implementation? To answer this broad question, perform a comprehensive written case analysis, for which the expectation is that you (1) identify all important strategic issues that the company needs to address, (2) perform a detailed analysis and evaluation, and (3) propose an overall action plan and set of specific recommendations addressing the issues you have identified. In going through the exercise of “Identify-Evaluate-Recommend,” please follow the advice (pp. 8-10) in the Guide to Case Analysis (which is linked on the LearnOnline course website).