Eligibility Criteria
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All participants must be full-time undergraduate students at universities in Japan at the time of application and competition.
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Auditors and part-time students are not recognized as full-time undergraduate students and therefore ineligible to apply.
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Teams must be composed of 4 undergraduate students and a coach. Coach is allowed to guide several teams concurrently.
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A coach who is either a faculty or staff member of the university is mandatory, to accompany the 4 team members to the competition. The coach must be someone else to train the team to prepare them for the competition. (Please consult with the main office if there is trouble with finding a coach)
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Participants can only belong to one team.
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The member of the winning team will participate in the HSBC/HKU Asia Pacific Business Case Competition 2023 (typically be held online at the end of May or early June). If a member is unable to participate by the time of the HSBC/HKU Asia Pacific Business Case Competition 2023, the winning team will need to select new members and form a new team of 4 people (undergraduate students enrolled at the same university)
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Students who have participated in the past HSBC/HKU Asia Pacific Business Case Competition are ineligible to participate in APU JBCC 2023.
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There are no set English proficiency requirements for participants. However, last year's participants' English proficiency level is around 700 (TOEIC), 60 (TOEFL IBT), 500 (TOEFL iTP), 5.5 (IELTS), and Junikkyu level (Eiken Exam).
Competition Rules
General
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members provide their own devices. All participants need to log in to Zoom from the device with their video camera turned on. All participants are advised to use a headset and be in a quiet space for better audio quality.
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By participating, students consent that the presentation and recorded Q&A session will be used by ACRC (Asia Case Research Center), HKU (The University of Hong Kong), and Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University for educational, promotional and other purposes.
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The presentation slides should be handwritten
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The competition host may make changes to the preparation and presentation time
Preparation
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Participants are allowed to use any publicly available materials (online and offline). During the competition, students are only allowed to discuss the case with their group members. Case related discussion with coaches, teachers, company executives, friends, and family is not allowed until after each round.
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Students are allowed to use collaboration software such as Google Docs or such during the case preparation.
Presentation
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The video presentation for the Preliminary round may be submitted in either English or Japanese. The presentations for the Semifinal and Final must be in English
The presentation slides should be handwritten on white A4 paper, scanned or photographed and inserted into a PTP file. Graphs, tables, charts, etc. should be in hand-written form. ACRC will provide a title slide template that has to be inserted at the start of the slides. Here are examples or presentations:
The submitted presentation may include back up slides with additional details that will not be used during the presentation, but may be used for the Q&A session if necessary.
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During the presentation, students are only allowed to use ZOOM software.
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For every round, the presentations will last 20 minutes followed by a 15 minutes Q&A session. The students will be presenting the earlier submitted slides live using ZOOM.
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For the semi-final and final round, the ZOOM meeting link or ID will be sent to all participants by JBCC in advance. Participants should inform JBCC in case they have not received the link or ID number at least an hour before the Presentation. The presentation will be directly followed by the Q&A session.
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All team members have to be visible at all times during the presentation.
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During the presentation, students cannot be in the same room as their teammate or their coach.
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Team coaches are allowed to join in the Q&A session, just to oversee.