College of Business
AACSB International EQUIS - European Quality Improvement System

Marketing student wins 2014 Philips Business Competition

Jeff Yau Chung-Kai, BBA China Business final year student, teamed up with four other undergraduate students from HKUST and PolyU to win the 2014 Philips Business Competition organized by Philips (China) Investment Co Ltd.

The competition provided a platform for college students to utilize their innovative business knowledge. Over 90 teams each submitted a report analysing the company’s latest business issues, and 20 teams were shortlisted to enter the next stage - to design a marketing and sales plan for the company’s newly released product Philips Ionic Styling Brush for the mainland China market.

Four finalists were selected to execute their plans on the online shopping platform Tmall.com. Each team was given RMB10,000 to carry out their marketing campaign for one month. A final presentation with actual sales figures was held in Shanghai on 10th January.

“It was an amazing experience. I enjoyed the competition process and have met many intelligent people from different backgrounds along the way. I learnt a lot of decision making strategies from devising and executing the marketing plan. It was a challenging competition. We did thorough market research at the beginning, and it was a rewarding experience to incorporate the knowledge and theories learnt in classrooms into a real business,” Jeff said.

The sales volume of Jeff’s team was the highest among all the participating teams. They achieved an outstanding result by dividing the marketing campaign into two stages: in the first two weeks, they aimed to increase the publicity of the product in Weibo; then they targeted to boost the sales by forming partnerships in WeChat in the last two weeks.

The winning team was awarded a cash prize of RMB20,000, internship offers, and a fast track should they wish to apply for company’s Management Trainee Scheme.

For information about the competition, please click here.