UH students win business consulting contest

Four undergraduate students from the University of Hawaii’s Shidler College of Business recently won a competition for international business problem solving in Boston.

Kelli Sunabe, Christina Rivers, Eryn Yuasa and Jessica Eggers beat 15 other university teams of undergraduate international business students in the contest sponsored by the Consortium for Undergraduate International Business Education held at Northeastern University from Nov. 2 to 4.

The CUIBE competition involves giving teams cases of real international companies that faced adversity, and challenging the teams to formulate and present recommendations. The UH team’s case study was for Swiss firm PharmaCorp, which faced a crisis with its operations in politically and economically destabilized Ukraine.

The UH team practiced for two months leading up to the competition. “I can honestly say that I am so extremely proud of the presentation we created and the team we’ve become,” Sunabe, the team’s captain, said in a statement.

Constancio Paranal, a Shidler College faculty adviser, said the win was for everyone in Hawaii. “The girls worked hard for this, not only to make a statement but to show the international business education community that the Shidler College of Business can win a national business case competition,” he said in a statement.