International Business and Finance Olympiad, Bucharest 2026
A full teaching reference for the five of you: how the competition actually works, how to work together without rigid roles, every formula with a worked example, both strategy frameworks and the macroeconomics from the syllabus, tonight's checklist, and the minute by minute case day sequence.
Read this once tonight as a group. It is the entire game in a few paragraphs, and everything else in this dossier expands one piece of it.
You will receive an extensive case study about a real style multinational, or a division of one, that is in genuine trouble. The trouble is always rooted in shifting international market conditions: currency swings, new competitors, a tariff, a demand shock, a cost spiral. You get a full information package built to mirror what an actual consulting team would receive: an income statement, a balance sheet, a cash flow statement, market research, competitor analysis, an organisational chart, and internal memos from the company's leadership.
The intellectual task is not to summarise this pile of information. It is to filter it. Most of what you are given will be noise, context, or a symptom of a deeper problem rather than the problem itself. Your entire grade depends on whether you can find the actual root cause and build a coherent, financially grounded solution around it, then defend that solution when a panel tries to take it apart.
Part 1, the Financial Report. A complete calculation and interpretation of the company's key performance indicators, spanning profitability, liquidity, solvency and leverage, and efficiency. This is not decoration. It is the evidence base that everything else in your submission has to be consistent with. If your strategic recommendation contradicts what your own ratios say about the company, the judges will notice immediately.
Parts 2 and 3, the Comprehensive Written Report, also called the Action Plan. A professional document addressed to the company's Board of Directors. It needs an executive summary that is short and persuasive, a root cause analysis backed by the numbers from Part 1, a strategic recommendation that is specific rather than generic (a capital restructuring, a market entry, a digital transformation, or similar), a three year pro forma financial projection that quantifies the expected effect on revenue, EBITDA, and NPV or ROI, and an implementation roadmap with a real timeline, named resources, and the KPIs you will use to track execution.
The Pitch. A formal presentation to a judge panel acting as the Board, roughly ten minutes, followed by roughly ten minutes of Q&A where the panel will test whether your assumptions actually hold up. This is where a technically strong report can still lose, or a modest report can still win, depending on how the team handles pressure together.
You do not get to choose freely what Parts 2 and 3 focus on. After the initial round of analysis, team leaders from every country meet in an Interim Meeting, capped at two hours, and vote on the final two core challenges or constraints that every team's Parts 2 and 3 must address. Only after that vote do you get roughly three hours to build your real strategy against whatever constraint was chosen.
This has a direct consequence for how you should build Part 1. It needs to be broad and flexible enough to support more than one possible strategic direction, because you genuinely do not know which constraint will be selected until partway through the day. Teams that build a narrow, single-track analysis in the first phase often have to backtrack once the constraint is confirmed.
Your leader's real value is delivered before tomorrow: making sure every one of you has actually internalised the syllabus rather than skimmed it. Once the competition starts, they are not allowed to coach you, correct you, or feed you answers during the working sessions. Their only official task inside the competition is representing your team at the Interim Meeting vote. That means the most useful thing you can do tonight is brief them clearly on which one or two strategic directions your team is genuinely strongest at executing, so their vote reflects what you can actually deliver well tomorrow, not just what sounds most impressive in the abstract.
Taken directly from the official agenda on ibfolympiad.org.
Arrival at Otopeni airport (OTP), transfer to the ASE Bucharest dormitories, administrative registration, and a Welcome Dinner in the evening. This day is deliberately light on the agenda. Treat it as your real preparation window and use the tonight's checklist tab before you sleep.
Opening Ceremony first, then the judge panel is introduced and the competition rules are confirmed in detail. The case study is formally distributed at this point. The afternoon is dedicated workspace time. Inside that block the sequence runs: an initial deep dive analysis, then the Interim Meeting where team leaders vote on the final two constraints (capped at two hours), then a roughly three hour second sprint where you refine your strategy against whatever was chosen. The day ends with the hard submission deadline for the written report and the slide deck.
Final preparation of the report and deck, then the presentation pitches and Q&A sessions in front of the judge panel. In the evening, the Awards and Closing Ceremony, with a gala dinner and the announcement of winners.
Check out from the dormitories in the morning, with organised transfers back to the airport.
Fixed job titles break down the moment the case gets weird, and it will get weird. What actually holds a five person team together under a hard deadline is a shared understanding of the phases of the day, clear communication checkpoints, and everyone being able to step into more than one function. Use this instead of assigning permanent roles.
When the case lands, nobody should retreat immediately into their own corner. Spend the first stretch with all five of you reading the same material at the same time, even if you then split up the deep work. The reason: the root cause is often hiding in a section that looks irrelevant to whoever is not reading it closely, like a throwaway line in an internal memo that explains why a ratio moved the way it did. If only one person reads the memos and only one person reads the financials, nobody in the room can connect the two.
After the shared read, break into two pairs plus one floater rather than five separate lanes. One pair drives the financial diagnosis: pulling every ratio, building the KPI table, and flagging what looks abnormal against typical ranges. The other pair drives the narrative and strategic reading: what the memos imply, what the competitor data suggests, what the market research is trying to tell you about where this company got hurt. The floater moves between both pairs, asks the annoying outsider questions ("does this recommendation actually follow from that ratio"), and starts assembling the shared document and slide skeleton so nothing has to be built from scratch later. Pairing beats solo work because a second set of eyes on a ratio calculation or a strategic claim catches errors before they get built into the final report.
Whoever is fastest at typing or has the clearest writing voice should not be locked into writing everything for three straight hours. Rotate the actual pen (the person typing into the shared report) every 45 minutes to an hour so that fatigue does not concentrate in one person, and so more than one person develops a feel for how the whole document reads together. The person not currently holding the pen reviews what was just written for consistency with the numbers.
Agree tonight on a check in cadence for tomorrow, something like every 45 to 60 minutes, where all five of you stop for two or three minutes, say what you just found or built, and flag anything that contradicts what someone else is working on. This is far more effective than people randomly interrupting each other, and it is far more effective than nobody talking until the deadline is close and everyone discovers their sections do not agree.
Before the case even arrives, have an honest ten minute conversation tonight about who is genuinely fastest and most accurate with ratio calculation under time pressure, who writes the clearest prose fastest, who is best at building a financial projection that holds together, and who is most convincing standing up and presenting under pressure. Do not assume these map onto whoever is "the finance person" or "the presentation person" by reputation. Let the actual skills in the room decide who leans into what tomorrow, and expect that to shift once you see the real case, because a case about a currency shock needs different strengths up front than a case about a competitive threat.
Whoever is not deep in a calculation or a paragraph at any given moment should be pulling finished material into the slide deck as it becomes ready, so the deck grows throughout the day instead of getting bolted together in the last 30 minutes. Decide the presenters, ideally two or three of the five rather than all five, only once you know the content and can see who explains which part most naturally. That decision belongs at the end of the analytical work, not before it.
While your team leader is away at the Interim Meeting, deciding the final two constraints with other team leaders, the five of you are not idle. This is the moment for maximum flexibility: keep deepening the financial diagnosis so it can support either likely direction, pre-build the parts of the report that will not change regardless of which constraint gets picked (company background, the financial diagnosis writeup, the industry context), and keep the slide skeleton growing. When your leader returns with the confirmed constraints, the team should be able to snap into focused execution within minutes, not spend twenty minutes figuring out where to even start.
Before the event, their job is making sure the syllabus is genuinely internalised by all five of you, not memorised the night before. During the event, they cannot coach or give answers, and their only task inside the competition is casting your team's vote at the Interim Meeting. Brief them tonight on the one or two directions your team is strongest at executing so that vote reflects what you can actually deliver, not just what sounds most impressive on paper.
Every ratio category IBFO requires as a minimum, plus the projection formulas Parts 2 and 3 need, each with a worked example so the formula is not just an abstraction. All numbers use one fictional company throughout so you can see how the ratios relate to each other.
Income statement: revenue 500, cost of goods sold 300, gross profit 200, SG&A and R&D combined 90, operating income (EBIT) 90, interest expense 15, earnings before tax 75, tax at 25 percent is 18.75, net income 56.25. Depreciation and amortisation for the period is 25.
Balance sheet: cash 40, accounts receivable 60, inventory 80, total current assets 180, net fixed assets 220, total assets 400. Accounts payable 50 within current liabilities of 100 total, long term debt 150, total liabilities 250, shareholders' equity 150.
To keep the arithmetic simple this example uses year end balances directly instead of averaging beginning and ending balances. In the real case you should average two consecutive period balances wherever the case gives you both, since that is the more accurate and more commonly expected method.
These frameworks are how you turn a financial diagnosis into an actual strategic recommendation. Pick the one or two that genuinely fit the case rather than forcing all four into the report. Judges notice when a framework is used because it was memorised rather than because it explains something real about the company.
A simple two by two built on two questions: is the product new or existing, and is the market new or existing. It forces you to name where you think growth or recovery should come from before you start building a plan around it.
Existing product, existing market. Sell more of what you already have to the customers you already serve, usually through pricing, promotion, or distribution. Lowest risk, often the right call for short term stabilisation.
New product, existing market. Build something new for the customers you already understand. Higher R&D risk, but you are not fighting to understand a new customer base at the same time.
Existing product, new market. Take what already works and bring it to a new geography or new customer segment. Common recommendation when the case involves currency shifts or trade barriers making a new region newly attractive.
New product, new market. The highest risk quadrant, since you are learning a new product and a new customer at once. Only recommend this if the case gives you a genuinely strong reason the company cannot recover through the other three.
Plots business units or product lines on two axes: market growth rate and relative market share. Useful whenever the case gives you a multi division or multi product company and the real question is what to keep, fix, fund, or cut.
High growth, high share. Worth continued investment, they are likely to become tomorrow's cash cows if the market matures without losing share.
High growth, low share. Require a real decision: invest heavily to try to build share into a star, or accept they may never pay back and consider divesting.
Low growth, high share. Generate more cash than they need for reinvestment. Often the source of funding for the stars and question marks elsewhere in the portfolio.
Low growth, low share. Usually candidates for divestment or wind down unless they serve a strategic purpose beyond direct profitability, such as blocking a competitor.
Introduction. Low sales, high marketing spend, often negative cash flow. Strategic focus is building awareness and distribution.
Growth. Sales accelerate, competitors begin entering, margins are often at their best. Strategic focus is building market share fast before the market matures.
Maturity. Sales growth flattens, the market is saturated, competition is intense and often price based. Strategic focus shifts to efficiency, differentiation, and defending share. This is the stage where many IBFO cases sit, because a mature, competitively pressured business is exactly the kind of company that ends up needing a turnaround.
Decline. Sales fall, often due to substitution or changing preferences. Strategic focus is harvesting remaining cash flow, repositioning, or planned exit.
The core idea is that competing head to head in an existing, crowded market (a red ocean) is usually a losing long term strategy, and the better path is creating a new, uncontested market space (a blue ocean) through value innovation, meaning you simultaneously pursue differentiation and low cost rather than treating them as a trade off.
The practical tool is the four actions framework: what should be eliminated that the industry takes for granted but customers no longer value, what should be reduced well below the industry standard, what should be raised well above the industry standard, and what should be created that the industry has never offered. This framework is strongest when the case describes a company stuck in brutal price competition with no clear differentiation left, rather than a company with a straightforward financial or operational problem.
Regardless of which of the frameworks above you use to generate the idea, IBFO explicitly wants the plan expressed on two time horizons. Short term stabilisation, roughly six to twelve months, covers measures to stabilise cash flow and liquidity and contain immediate losses, things like cost containment, working capital discipline, or renegotiating short term obligations. Long term sustainability, roughly three to five years, covers financial restructuring, operational improvement, and strategic repositioning, which is where your chosen framework and your three year pro forma projection actually live. Alongside both horizons, the plan needs explicit stakeholder management (who needs to be communicated with and how) and explicit risk management (what could go wrong, how likely it is, how much it would hurt, and what you would do about it).
The case's root cause is described as coming from shifting international market conditions, which means the macroeconomic half of the syllabus is not background reading, it is very likely the actual trigger of the crisis you are analysing. This section follows the syllabus's own revision focus areas.
Higher direct taxation (income tax, corporate tax) reduces disposable income and after tax profit. For individuals this can weaken the incentive to work additional hours or seek promotion, sometimes described as reduced work incentives, and can affect labour mobility if higher earners are taxed more heavily in one jurisdiction than another. For a company, higher corporate taxation directly reduces net income and can push investment decisions toward lower tax jurisdictions. If a case mentions a change in corporate tax policy in the company's home market, trace it through to net profit margin and then to what that means for available reinvestment capital.
A rise in VAT or another indirect tax increases the price the end consumer pays without changing the pre tax price the company charges, which reduces real purchasing power and tends to reduce consumer demand, particularly for goods with elastic demand. This differs from direct taxation because it hits consumption immediately regardless of income level, and it is often the more visible driver of a demand side revenue problem in a case, especially combined with general inflation eroding real purchasing power further.
When interest rates rise, borrowing becomes more expensive, which raises a company's interest expense directly (watch the times interest earned ratio) and can reduce both business investment and consumer spending on big ticket, credit financed purchases. For a highly leveraged company, a rate rise can quickly turn a survivable debt load into a genuine solvency risk, which is exactly the kind of chain a case is likely testing whether you can trace: rates rise, interest expense rises, EBIT to interest coverage weakens, debt servicing capacity deteriorates, and the company's options narrow toward refinancing or restructuring.
If the home currency appreciates, imports become cheaper (helpful if the company imports raw materials or components) but exports become more expensive to foreign buyers, hurting export competitiveness and potentially inflating reported foreign revenue when translated back, or deflating it, depending on direction. If the home currency depreciates, the reverse happens: imports get more expensive (raising input costs and squeezing gross margin) while exports become more price competitive abroad. A case built around a multinational is very likely to include an exchange rate move as part of the root cause, so check whether the company is a net importer or net exporter of the inputs and outputs that matter most before concluding what an exchange rate move actually did to them.
A tariff raises the price of imported goods for domestic buyers, which protects domestic producers from foreign competition but raises costs for domestic buyers and consumers and can trigger retaliation from trade partners. Dumping refers to a foreign producer selling into a market below their normal home market price, or below production cost, usually to gain share or eliminate competitors, and anti dumping duties are the policy response designed to offset that unfair pricing. If a case describes a foreign competitor suddenly undercutting on price by an amount that does not look sustainable, that is the classic setup for a dumping and anti dumping discussion, and the strategic response often runs through trade policy advocacy alongside your company level recommendation.
A market with high concentration (a small number of firms holding most of the market share) tends to have higher prices, lower output, and higher barriers to entry than a fragmented, competitive market. Economies of scale can be a legitimate reason for concentration, but they can also be used to justify anti competitive behaviour that regulators scrutinise. If the case involves a merger, an acquisition, or a dominant competitor squeezing the company you are analysing, competition policy (and whether a regulator might intervene) becomes directly relevant to what strategic options are even realistically available to you.
The case drops tomorrow morning. This is the last calm block you get before then. Tap an item to check it off, progress is tracked for this session.
The actual sequence of tomorrow, phase by phase, written around the fluid pairing model from the how we work tab rather than fixed lanes. Times are illustrative, anchor to the organisers' real schedule on the day itself.