American University of the Middle East Wins 2019 Middle East Student Case Competition

IMA® (Institute of Management Accountants) today announced the winners of its Middle East Student Case Competition held on April 20, 2019. The American University of the Middle East (AUM) in Kuwait was announced the grand winner followed by the University of Jordan as the first runner-up. The winning teams also received cash prizes of US$ 3000 and US$ 2000 respectively.  

“We are pleased to announce that this year’s student case competition was a record-breaking year. We received a total of 23 submissions from 16 universities in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia. The submissions underwent a preliminary evaluation by a task force composed of IMA members and the top four student teams were chosen,” said Rishi Malhotra, Academic and Community Relations Manager at IMA Middle East.

The teams who qualified for the final round of the competition were from the American University of Science and Technology (AUST) in Lebanon, The American University in Cairo (AUC) in Egypt, the American University of the Middle East (AUM) in Kuwait, and the University of Jordan.

This year, teams were given the opportunity to analyze a business case study and propose a solution for a food services start-up. The students were tasked to conduct financial planning and analysis by evaluating the first six months of operations and advise the business owner on how to reach her profit goals including the possibility of expanding or aborting the business altogether.

“As a CMA® (Certified Management Accountant) myself, I want my students to go through the process, compare budget versus actuals, be able to identify appropriate metrics, compute variables, and prepare financial statements. That’s how they will see the problems, come up with solutions, and be able to discuss accounting and non-accounting issues,” said Ahmed Yamen, PhD, CMA, CertIFRS & CertIA, the winning team’s mentor and associate professor of accounting at AUM.

The IMA Student Case Competition is a global competition held annually across countries to help accounting and finance professors showcase their students’ business analysis skills and prepare them for the complex business needs of today’s organizations. As a policy, IMA does not allow faculty or other professional assistance in solving the case.

Each case competition entry was required to present a solution to the case. The case study is common to all participating teams across the globe and was published in IMA’s Strategic Finance magazine in August this year.

The judges for this year’s competition were Abdur Rahim Ghulam Nabi, CMA, CFM, APM, Senior Advisor, Finance and Commercial Division at Dubai Airport Freezone, Jyoti Chokshi, CMA, Finance Manager, Jotun U.A.E, and Hanadi Khalife, Director, MEA and India Operations at IMA.