*** ACCA Paper AFM December 2019 Exam was.. Instant Poll and comments ***

This exam was quite hard. As most of the people said, section 3 was horrible. Very few past paper had this sort of question 3.

Q1 – ‘changes from treasury department being a cost center unit to a profit center unit’.
I mentioned about budget difference, changes regarding objective of the treasury manager, treasury dep can now invoice with mark up to other dep for their services and make profit……
What did you guys talk about?
– ‘currency hedging: using netting method for intercompany transaction, for payment to supplier = futures or money hedged market’
Net result for intercompany transaction, I got zero.
I got that futures was a cheaper option than MMH for the supplier transaction

– FX hedging: using FRAs and option.
I concluded that option was a better hedge solution as it give more flexibility as the IR would increase in the future.

What did you guys go?
Not sure if my calculation was right, but found this part quite ok.

– gemma and Delta – didnt remember anything about that. sad could have been easy mark

– reduce risk of portfolio by diversification. I mentioned about unsystematic and systematic risk.

Not sure if anyone put this.

Please comment on what you wrote about.

Q2 –
NPV – was ok as Revenue, VC was already given,
needed to calculate FC, WC, TAD, Tax – so it was quite ok
got a positive NPV

secondly needed to calculate sensitivity analysis on initial investment and sales.
I got very confused on how to calculate SA sales. as I thought I need to get the price/unit. I was stuck for almost 10 min in this part. then just took the revenue and discounted it.

How did you guy do it?

finally had to calculate the VAR with a 95% confidence level. That was ok too

b)discuss about risk and how to mitigate them.
Talk about other implication that need to be considered such as strategic implication, legal….

Not sure if I misinterpreted the question???!!!
C) option to expend or delay =
Talk about real option that give flexibility and that manger would need to calculate and analyse real option.

Q3- OMG – big mess for me I didn’t understand the marking here.
I still think that the examiner might have done some sort of mistake with the marking.
How can calculating and discussing about gearing and interest cover be 7 or 9 marks??!! Don’t remember exactly if it was 7 or 9.
And then another 9-10 marks for discussion?!!!!

Conclusion,

Obviously I did not get time to finish the paper.
And I think I would most probably fail because of this Q3??!!!!!!!!

Please feel free to share your answers with me.

@annie.mwanza1991 said:
My someone please confirm if the first question in part B for multinetting we were supposed to be dividing or multiply…

Hi Annie,

I am not sure myself about what i got or if i got a pass mark.

But i believe if we were converting other currencies to dollars, If the currency we are converting to dollars is a weaker currency we would have to divide by the dollar spot rate. then if the currency we are converting to dollar is stronger than the dollar the we have to multiply.

And i do remember the was only one Euro subsidiary and that was the only one we had to multiply to give us the dollars we needed.

But for the others we simply divide to give us the dollars we need as the dollar was the stronger currency.

Hope this is helpful. And hope this gives you some form of security than i have over the exam.