World Cup victory in the United States! Our alumni won the University of Vermont’s international case study competition!

A student team representing the Department of Economics and Business Administration in Hungarian Language of Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (BBU) and the GTK Business Consulting Club won the international case study competition, known as the World Cup for Family Businesses, hosted by the Grossman School of Business at the University of Vermont, USA. The competition took place from January 8-11, 2025, with a total of 24 prestigious university teams from 4 different continents participating.

The BBU and GTK team consisted of Zsófia Bánffy, Anna Bugár, Kata Kovács (all first-year master’s students in Data-Driven Management), and Krisztina Bokor-Tóth (second-year master’s student in Business Management). The team was coached by Dr. Levente Szász, Dr. Lehel Györfy, and Dr. Béla-Gergely Rácz, with PhD student Kincső Kelemen accompanying the team to the competition.

In addition to the team’s victory, Anna Bugár, a member of the team, won the special award for the best presenter (“Best Presenter Award”) in the final round of the competition.

The students from Cluj-Napoca delivered an outstanding performance on the international stage: in the qualifying round, competing with teams from universities in Canada and the United States, they achieved the highest overall score in the first three rounds, thus qualifying directly for the six-team final. In the first three rounds, teams had to develop solutions for economic challenges such as creating a business plan for operating a senior citizens’ residential complex, taking into account the opinions of different generations within the family-run business, selling a family-owned print and media business struggling with succession, and developing a business strategy for a family business facing a generational transition.

In the final, the six qualifying teams had to come up with a solution for a case study on the acquisition of a company, with 4 hours allocated for this task. The panel of experts, consisting of American professors, business consultants, and entrepreneurs, unanimously agreed that the best solution was presented by the BBU and GTK team from Cluj-Napoca, who thus claimed first place in the competition. The final results for the master’s level competition were as follows:

1st place: Babeș-Bolyai University

2nd place: York University (Canada)

3rd place: University of Adelaide (Australia)

We congratulate our students for their outstanding performance on the international stage, which once again demonstrates the world-class competitiveness of the Hungarian-language economics program at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca!