Foot Locker: five years of Ken Hicks ended in record profits
Ken Hicks took the mall sneaker chain in 2009, was credited with dramatically growing sales and earnings, and handed over a $520m-profit business.
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2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDLeopalace21 lost its equity to construction defects, then earned a ¥11.8bn profit by 2022
Up to 1,324 of its apartment buildings failed recognised specifications. Leopalace21 paid for repairs until its equity vanished, then returned to profit.
Read the caseGoogle launched Android free and open source in the 2008 crash, then owned mobile
Days after Lehman, Google shipped the G1 and gave Android away; a decade later the free OS neared 90% of the world's smartphones.
Read the casePepsiCo brought Crystal Pepsi back to cash in on 90s nostalgia
Fan demand drove a limited Crystal Pepsi return, backed by a summer campaign and a retro web game.
Read the caseSamsung burned 150,000 of its own phones to force quality over volume
Samsung's chairman found its products gathering dust next to Sony's in a store. He later had 150,000 defective phones smashed and burned in front of workers.
Read the caseShree Renuka Sugars: founder cedes control to Wilmar in debt rescue, survives
Crushed by Rs 6,500 crore of debt after failed Brazil bets, India's largest sugar refiner handed control to Wilmar in 2018, which restructured it.
Read the caseTianfu Cola won back its brand after 22 years in a Pepsi venture
Shelved by its 1994 Pepsi venture, Tianfu Cola regained recipe and trademark in court, relaunched in 2016, but faced a market dominated by Coke and Pepsi.
Read the caseCasella Wines: the heir's [yellow tail] turned a bulk grape farm into a US giant
John Casella took his Sicilian migrant parents' contract-grape vineyard and built [yellow tail] with an American importer — 2.2 million cases by year two.
Read the caseFord family let an outsider run the company — and avoided bankruptcy
Bill Ford handed the CEO job to Boeing's Alan Mulally in 2006; mortgaging Ford's assets for $23.6B staved off bankruptcy and profit returned by 2009.
Read the caseVW's 1998 New Beetle rebuilt a dead icon and started an industry retro wave
Piëch greenlit a nostalgia Bug on Golf hardware; 1999 US sales hit 83,434, up nearly 60% on the debut year, and the retro formula spread to Mini and Fiat.
Read the caseEdwards sold non-core lines to double down on the unproven TAVR bet
Through 2008 Edwards divested non-core lines and kept funding transcatheter heart valves; Sapien's 2011 approval made it a top post-2008 performer.
Read the caseColes: Wesfarmers paid $22bn, doubled the earnings, and spun it out again
Wesfarmers bought a fading Coles in 2007, installed ex-Tesco Ian McLeod, more than doubled the division's EBIT, and listed it again as a top-30 company.
Read the casePioneer took ¥77bn from a fund, left the market, and was sold on for ¥160bn in 2025
Cash-negative and loss-making, Pioneer let BPEA inject ¥77bn and take it private in 2019 to rebuild around car electronics. CarUX bought it in 2025.
Read the caseTrip.com halved in 2020, then livestreamed and listed its way through the pandemic
Revenue fell 49% in 2020; James Liang sold $294m of travel on weekly livestreams, raised $1.09bn in Hong Kong, and 2023 net revenue reached RMB44.5bn.
Read the caseMuonium scaled political AI production by outsourcing at the 2024 election
When India's 2024 election overwhelmed its team, Muonium limited clients to trusted parties and added outside VFX capacity, reaching nearly 10 campaigns.
Read the caseDanaher turned one struggling brake factory's fix into its operating system
Danaher's Jacobs Vehicle Systems unit was losing customers to poor quality. Fixing it with kaizen worked so well Danaher rolled the method out company-wide.
Read the caseBajaj Finance turned captive two-wheeler loans into India's largest NBFC
Split from captive two-wheeler loans in 2007-08, Bajaj Finance rebuilt on zero-interest durable EMIs banks ignored — now India's largest NBFC, 83.6M customers.
Read the caseNextWave kept $4.7B of spectrum through Chapter 11, then sold it for billions
The 1996 auction winner stopped paying, beat the FCC at the Supreme Court, kept its licenses, then sold them to Cingular and Verizon for billions.
Read the caseChampion turned a faded 1990s label into a streetwear hit via collabs.
By pairing its Reverse Weave heritage with Supreme and Vetements and leaning into athleisure, Champion grew from about $1B (2017) to $1.36B (2018) globally.
Read the caseArmani used his will to force the sale he refused in life — and who may buy
For fifty years Giorgio Armani turned down every suitor. His will ordered the opposite: sell 15% within 18 months — and named the three allowed buyers.
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