Despite their reputation in the 1980s as corporate raiders, most private equity firms attempt to improve the performance of their portfolio companies through better corporate governance. But while the G in ESG (environmental, social, and governance) has always been important in the industry, the E and the S have been virtually nonexistent. Private equity has been comfortable seeking returns with little concern for the long-term sustainability of portfolio .....more

Borusan Cat is an international distributor of Caterpillar heavy machines. In 2021, it had been three years since Ozgur Gunaydin (CEO) and Esra Durgun (Director of Strategy, Digitization, and Innovation) started working on Muneccim, the company''s predictive AI tool. While the prediction accuracy of the tool was on the rise, the sales team remained resistant to incorporating it into their sales approach. Gunaydin and Durgun knew that, to get .....more

Supplement to case 222012.

In 2022, after five years of pursuing a new "AI-first" strategy, Google had captured a sizeable share of the American and global markets for voice assistants. Google Assistant was used by hundreds of millions of users around the world, but Amazon retained the largest share of the smart speaker market, and Apple''s share was quickly growing following a strategic shift towards affordability. In addition, Chinese companies including .....more

Blu-Smart Mobility Pvt. Ltd. (BluSmart) was India''s first company to foray into the electric mobility space. Launched in 2019, BluSmart offered ride sharing, car sharing, and shared charging services, and aimed to make India a pollution-free country by providing customers with a complete urban mobility solution. Within a year, BluSmart had garnered investors'' attention and received millions in funding to grow its fleet. It also planned .....more

Ebidding, Shanghai Huizhao Information Technology Co., Ltd.''s key product, was China''s only "Internet+" integrated bidding and procurement service provider, integrating supply chain management consulting, project implementation, and electronic bidding platform operation. Its main business was to provide enterprises with a full-process electronic bidding and procurement solution. The Ebidding team had developed a full-process .....more

The founder of Jucai Human Resources Development Co., Ltd. had witnessed the development of China''s human resources service industry over the previous 20 years. In the company''s early stages, it had mainly relied on the advantage of information asymmetry of the Internet to carry out online recruitment services. But from 2015, the founder became interested in and confident about the prospects of providing a talent assessment service .....more

Supplement to 522087.

2021 was a banner year for Elon Musk. CEO of the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, the aerospace manufacturer SpaceX, and a few smaller startups, Musk became the richest person on Earth after Tesla reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion and SpaceX a private valuation of $100 billion. Both companies made bet big on risky technologies. Now that they were leaders in booming industries, the task was to retain their lead. Musk had proposed a .....more