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Lufthansa Study Case

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Herr Heinz Ruhnau decision to buy 20 airplanes from Boeing in 1985 for $500.000.000 was a mistake, so the Board of Lufthansa should fire him due to poor judgement. His strong feeling that the US exchange rate was going to drop, it wasn’t based on any evidence, so he should have postponed buying the planes until after the rate had actually dropped, in order to save company money. Regardless of the speculations that he had about the exchange rate, he should have put options on the money to save the company from higher losses if he’s intuition was not correct. There were 5 possible hedging alternatives. First was to remain uncovered, the riskiest option, which it depends on how the exchange rate will change in the coming year. In this case it would the the most profitable, but still a big risk to make such a decision. The second one was to apply a full forward cover which allows the company to buy forward contracts for the entire amount and eliminate the risk. In this case, Lufthansa pays $1.600.000.000 due to the current spot exchange rate and it doesn’t depend on how the rate would change. The third alternative was to buy Foreign Currency Options, this means to buy put options and let the expire, then purchase dollars for a lesser amount. This would have cost the company $1.246.000.000 and it would be the most profitable decision. The last alternative was to Buy Dollars Now which required the company to have all the money and hold them until the payment is done in January 1986. Lufthansa couldn’t consider this an option because it had strict covenants in place, which limited the types, amounts and currencies of denomination of the debt it could carry on it’s balance sheet.

Justification:
Herr Heinz Ruhnau had the next justification to keep his job: * He was thinking that the price of U.S. dollar will fall and in the end the

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