Tech Industry Drivers

Catalog description

Visit http://www.dangode.com/techdrivers/ for details. Concentrations: Accounting, Computing and Data Science, Marketing. Minor: Entertainment, Media, and Technology (EMT). Track: Management Consulting. This course and the Business Drivers course use the same analytical framework (about 25% of the course). However, this course focuses only on tech companies. Some students have taken both courses and found them to be valuable. We illustrate a streamlined and structured framework to analyze business drivers of forty tech companies. This helps us understand their business model, drill into their financial statements, and assess competitive advantage. The analysis proceeds as follows: (1) We apply the Six-Pack Framework for a top-down and comprehensive analysis of financial statements to extract the six key inputs into valuation – Size, Growth, Margins, Asset intensity, Business risk, and Financial risk. (2) We analyze how these inputs depend upon a company’s strategy by computing the Competitive Advantage Score that assigns weights to competitive drivers and scores the company’s strength on those drivers. This broad exposure will expand your tech horizons and enable you to foresee challenges and opportunities due to changing competition, technology, and environment. The framework and the perspective will sharpen your ability to lead value creation as a tech entrepreneur or executive, or to understand value creation as an investor, banker, analyst, or consultant.