‘This summer I joined the John Swire & Sons summer internship program, it was a fruitful and rewarding experience.

Swire Summer Internship Program is for individuals who want to join the Swire Management Program after graduation. The program aims to allow interns to understand Swire’s ecosystem, network with Swire stakeholders, and drive their own project within one of the operating companies. Since the program is conducted by John Swire & Sons, the parent group, it has designed the program in a sense that interns could have first-hand experiences in one of its operating companies, while also looking at the business from a broader and strategic level perspective. Thus, the program is separated into two parts: complete tasks and projects under operating companies’ manager’s supervision, and collaborate with fellow interns to pitch a business idea for one of the operating companies.

I was seconded to Swire Coca-Cola Hong Kong, under the Commercial Leadership Team. My team mainly focuses on pricing, forecasting, and budgeting of the company. My main task was to facilitate the 2024 and 2025 forecasting and budgeting, and it comes in three folds. FIrst, consolidating 2017- 2024 NARTD market sales data from Nielsen and Global Data, and projected Swire Coca-Cola and competitors’ 2024 and 2025 monthly and FY market share and growth rate. Second, built a YTD Retrieval Tool for easy extraction of YTD data and growth rate comparison of adjustable periods with Excel. Lastly, developed a ‘Market Sensor’ Tool from scratch that aims to quantify the market intuition of category managers through providing a step-by-step guide to facilitate identification of factors that contribute to a NARTD market player’s performance. Throughout these tasks, I had a comprehensive and deeper understanding of how a NARTD company works and in particular, the process of projecting financials for budgeting use.

In general, GLEF is a well-planned program with a small cohort size where students can get the right amount of attention and build a closer bonding. The effective networking within GLEF allowed students to be more well-prepared when seeking for internships and full-time positions as they could seek help from seniors.’