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rationale and explanations that you give for reaching your recommendations, and how they relate, and are strengthen by, the current academic thinking (see below for use of literature).  Although the assignment refers specifically to financial management, you may also need to give marginal consideration to issues that are not strictly ‘financial’ issues, since the company’s long-term strategy is informed by several managerial functions.

J Sainsbury plc is a real company and to fulfil the requirements of your assignment you should use the latest available information on the company.  The company’s web site is full of relevant information, including the latest Annual Reports.  Financial information on the company can also be obtained from Datastream.

On the contrary, ‘your’ company is fictional and the assignment gives you remarkably little information on it.  This is because you should concentrate on Sainsbury.  In addition, if you had full information on your company, the assignment would become too complex and long.  If you wish, you can make some additional assumptions on your company, but if you do, please state them clearly.

The use of literature and referencing is one of the main weaknesses encountered in the work of past cohorts.  Your analysis needs to be embedded into the relevant theory and empirical evidence.  Although this is a report, you would notice that you are required to ensure that your arguments reflect the “latest academic thinking!”  Therefore, relevant recent references need to be discerningly used to support and strengthen your arguments.  It is not a competition to maximise the number of references, but markers will look for the appropriateness and quality of the references and evidence of wider reading, beyond the module reading list.  You must include a list of references at the end of your assignment, not a bibliography.  In other words, the reference list must include only sources referred to in the text of your assignment, and must comply with the style specified in your Programme Handbook.  This requirement relates to the Marking Descriptors that require your work to be well researched and findings fully evaluated.  Your assignment needs to provide evidence of well-developed analytical skills and satisfy the Marking Descriptors.  To give you just some examples, you are expected to:
(i) demonstrate awareness of the relevant literature by explicitly refer to the literature;
(ii) show that you researched your work well by referencing your sources of information;
(iii) fully evaluate findings and conclusions by comparing your findings with related studies found in the literature.

In the Motives section you are required to include “a detailed discussion of the main motives”.  The motives need to be critically assessed and again reflect “the latest academic thinking”.  The discussed motives need to be appropriate to “the proposed acquisition”, and the emphasis is “on the arguments … to present such a bid to its shareholders”.  To simply discuss a number of merger motives without much attempt to relate them to the proposed acquisition fails to answer the question.  Again, it is not a competition to include as many motives as possible, but markers will look for the relevance of the motives to t