AUK Team Wins at Kuwait’s Global Management Challenge

A team of students from the American University of Kuwait (AUK) triumphed as the first-place winners at Kuwait’s Global Management Challenge (GMC)—the world’s largest strategy and management simulation competition. They will be representing Kuwait in the international GMC competition in Yekaterinburg, Russia in July, 2019.

AUK has been participating in the competition since its inception in 2013. This year, AUK was represented by three teams of student who were selected from the College of Business & Economics (CBE). Members of the teams were selected to participate based on their performances in business-related courses. The teams were mentored by four faculty members from CBE: Dr. Ali Aljamal, Dr. Ahmed Kholeif, Dr. Mark Speece, and Dr. Aly Mansour. All three AUK teams qualified for the final round based on their performances in the earlier national qualifying rounds.

At the finals, the three groups of AUK students competed with three other teams representing universities and companies in an intense 8-hour market simulation. The winners were determined based on the performance of their assigned virtual companies with respect to the values of their market shares and investments. The two other AUK teams ranked fourth and fifth.

The Dean of the College of Business and Economics, Dr. Ralph Palliam, praised the AUK teams on their efforts in this year’s challenge for reaching the finals and winning first place, “The participation in the finals had great meaning to all students only because the competition was dominated by highly experienced teams from business organizations.”

AUK’s winning team included the following students:
Ismail O Al-Tahan (Team Leader)
Omar Matar
Fatema Abdulsaheb
Eman Eldin
Amer Khosla

Team’s leader, Ismail Al-Tahan, noted, "Understanding how various business departments interact, and how it all links back to investment performance was key to our success at the Global Management Challenge."

ADNAR Group, a leading vocational training service provider kicked-off the activities of the Global Management Challenge in Kuwait in 2013 with the participation of leading organizations in the private, educational and public sectors, among them ZAIN Telecom, Gulf Bank, Kuwait Maastricht Business School (KMBS), the American University of Kuwait (AUK), the Kuwait Stock Exchange, GulfCryo and Dot Space.