A team of three current students from the International MBA at IE Business School (Nishant Mittal and Vishalkumar Vithlani from India, and Ruiwei Xiong from China) have reached the final of the annual L’Oreal e-strat challenge competition. Thousands of MBA teams from all over the world competed, and after joining a select group of 300 teams in the semi-finals IEâ??s team is now among the remaining 8, representing Southern Europe in the finals. This is the first year an IE team has made it past the semi-finals in this particular competition.

L’Oréal e-Strat Challenge is one of the world’s biggest online business simulation. This international competition is open to undergraduate and MBA students in their final two years of university or business school. In its first seven editions, the L’Oréal e-Strat Challenge has brought together over 177 000 students from 2200 schools representing 128 countries.
Each team, consisting of three people, will manage a portfolio of beauty brands and compete for worldwide leadership against 4 other virtual companies during six rounds throughout a period of approximately two months. The teams will take the role of the General Manager. At the head of a cosmetics firm, they will face new market situations and challenges during each of the six rounds. They will translate their strategy into critical decisions about all aspects of the company: pricing, production volume and capacity, research and development, marketing, advertising, brand positioning and diversity & equity.

Every registered team will have the opportunity to participate in the first round, and then, according to their Share Price Index, 1700 of these teams will be selected to continue the adventure (rounds 2 – 5). All the teams participating in the L’Oréal e-Strat Challenge will manage PRIMA, but in a parallel simulated world, separate from yours. The objective is to achieve the highest SHARE PRICE INDEX (SPI) at the end of the simulation.

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