*** ACCA P3 June 2018 Exam was.. Instant Poll and comments ***

Guys can anyone list down SWOT points?
I couldn’t find many, specially Weaknesses.

Q1 was quite tricky. There wasn’t enough information about the company’s weaknesses. I could only come up with one.
The paper overall was quite difficult and I am a little disappointed.

The paper was hard to be honest. Primarily because of question 1. It was very difficult to find enough points for the SWOT analysis… Q3 for those who did was hard for that same reason… simply couldn’t find enough points for the mark allocation. Very disappointed.

Question one was very hard. 80% numbers and 20% narrative…. how is that possible to draw enough SWOT. I still couldn’t find weakness.?

hello, i have put following weaknesses… 1.all leased assets are taken via credit (borrowings) interest rates could effect
2.they had significant devrease in car sales over period from 60% to 5%
3.most of their money (700m) is borrowed outside which can have big effect in case on negative exchange rates (which is also a threat)
4.almost all of their leases are via private sector, they are depended only on private companies that tend to have bad debts more then public sector

Yes, Q1 was really bad, hardly any information from the senerio and most of them were overlapping too. So donno if they consider dat and give a mark.

Anybody else surprised at the similarity between 1c and 4a? To assess suitability I used 5 forces as Q1 related to a foreign country and lo and behold so did Q4!

Saying that, I saw Q4 asking for 5 forces to assess the foreign fast food market, so I probably should have used Diamond on Q1 SFA. Oh well, still a macro model lol

I used SFA model in 1 c. Instead of putting ratio in acceptability, i have put in feasibility. will i lose full markss????

Strength: 1. World wide customer base.
2. Good CRM n funders/banks
3. Proper utilisation of fund resources n strong lease disbursement policy. In $800m disburse $800m.
4. Increased in lease funding in private n non-profit sector.

Weakness: 1. Flexible payment of lease policy.
2. Customer credit check n lack of intermidiary (assumpted)

Opportunity: 1. Government funding the university sector (public sector).

2. Infrastructure development lease funding.
3. Non profit sector lease finding.

Threats: 1. Car manufacturing-self financing.
2. Government imposing tax n declaring premium rate activities.

3. Government intends to put restrictions over lending.

No.

In Q2(b), simply advantages of OTS over bespoke were to be given?

What about part (a)?

I spent almost 1 month self studying.
1. Watched dinos lectuee
2. Read most selected technical articles
3. Skipped all the content tested in march(bcg job design project management) did not even read even a page on them
4. Did 2015 2016 past year papers

I found the exam to be very easy!!!

Q1.
If you read the answer scheme for their SWOT and TOWS analysis, they have pretty similar and repetitive points.

Some other pointers i raised:
– company has good competence in acquisition… but marine is a new industry and they lack the knowledge in that industry and that continent
– WO: car industry is being threatened… thats why they decided to move to the marine industry… but would it have been better if they done it locally first?
– shareholders of marine was selling at a low price; negative goodwill – is there any possible ethical threats involved?
– gov building more roads… but if leasing of car is more expensive… isnt it counter productive?? So maybe can negotiate with the gov with regards to the impending tax and restrictions. It may even hurt the non for profit sector leasing!

1b) Acquisition just use the SAF format, as recommended on their answer scheme. I also used the JSW model. I talked about change management, possible cultural clash, and the need to do porters diomand and pestel analysis should they proceed with the acquisition. For acceptability, i Calculated all the financial ratios and compared with industry average… must remember to explain all the ratios because management is “weak in accounting”. Feasibility wise… does company has money? Guess so! And they are selling the company cheap. But need to investigate why they are selling so cheap since the management is only controlled by 3 people.

For Q2, dino’s webcast covered it. For part 2b, i reasoned why off shelf is better than bespoke
– no time, urgency
– high admin cost already; its a charity
– 2 it personnel
– do not need advanced functions
Thus no need for bespoke

I also did q4, thought it was an interesting question!
There was also a past year question similar to this so i just recycled the points but i made sure that i was explaining in the context of the scenario!

Extremely happy with my performance!

Cant believe i pulled it off alone in just 1 month 🙂

– singapore!

I forgot to write “REPORT” at the top of the report for Q1a ,but wrote all other components in respect of the format such as
To:
From:
Date:
Subject
Introduction
Headings and short paragraphs and
Conclusion.
Would I lose any of the professional marks relating to the format ?

Hey guys a little off topic here, during the last 30mins of the exam my black pen gave up on me and for some reason I didn’t think of asking a possible spare one from the invigilator so I resolve to using a pencil! I know the rules stated very clearly but I was wondering could it be scanned anyway? I wrote as hard as I can and it looks very visible to me but not sure how it will shows up on the scanner.