Cree (C)

Another four years had passed, and it was now April 2018. After two attempts to shut down the venture totally, Hubert Rhomberg’s father Walter-Heinz presented Hubert with an opportunity to buy their cash-burning company, CREE, for €1. CREE had been “his baby” for the better part of a decade, during which it had burned more than €13 million in cash. With only €180k left in the bank, and some critical bills to pay to key suppliers, Hubert would be out of cash in two months’ time. Should he buy CREE? Or should he go back to the family construction, railway technology and resources business, where he’d been spending nearly 80% of his time anyway?