Warner Music Group

Julia Chan, Director, FP&A APAC

Sunset Economics: How Finance Leaders Maximized Value When Everyone Else Walked Away

Julia Chan

Financial Architect

Julia Chan is a finance leader specializing in financial planning and analysis, focused on lifecycle value optimization and strategic resource allocation. She emphasizes early signal tracking, scenario planning, and disciplined execution to help organizations extract value from declining products while enabling long-term growth.

Finance leaders obsess over launching strategies and harvesting at peak. When a product enters decline, the finance team runs a quick harvest calculation, slashes funding, and moves on to the next shiny object. The real value lies in both ends: executing the vision at launch and maximizing every dollar through sunset. How can finance leaders not let strategy die especially through sunset?

The essence of managing declining products is not purely for value maximization. The true benefit is to enable a company capability of resource re-allocation which helps to achieve long term sustainability and growth. There are several elements which lead to a successful management of declining products.

Element 1: Plan ahead before it falls

Companies take action at the last minute when they reach the stage of irreversible declines. They start different initiatives such as cost cutting to maintain their profitability. In fact, finance leaders can play a vital role in product life cycle management. Key signals should be in place in order to determine where the products are positioned in the life cycle. Signals can be both financial and non-financial such as sales growth, market share % and numbers of new customers gained. When these signals point to a direction that the products enter into the middle maturity stage such as stagnant growth, finance leaders can initiate the sunset planning conversation. This early preparation allows more time to explore options which may optimize the product values. It also creates a consensus of strategic change needed in the leadership team which leads to actions as the next step.

Element 2: Reimage the business

The typical strategies of managing sunset business are spend cutting and divestment. However, a step back should be taken to understand what the benefits of products to customers are in the current and future marketplace. If the products still have value to the customers, finance and business can explore options on whom to serve and how to serve the market in an efficient way. The change can be outsourcing to a distributor for sales and marketing functions, reducing the number of sales channels and developing a long term roadmap to exit the market.

“Real financial discipline is not just launching strong, but managing decline with foresight, reallocating resources effectively, and ensuring value is fully realized before exit.”

Finance leaders support the business reimagination by scenario planning and resource allocation. With scenario planning, we can understand how the new way of operation brings positive financial impacts to the business. In the process, finance leaders can help to advise how to fund the additional resources needed and reallocate the idle resources to new business opportunities.

Element 3: 2 Cs (Change management and constant review)

A brilliant strategy is a ghost until it’s brought to life. In order to execute the adjusted strategies successfully, change management is key. People are comfortable with the current way of working and need time and support to adapt to the new direction. Impacted teams should be communicated in advance to address their concerns and gain their buy-in. Communication should focus on why we need to change. During this journey, some hidden issues may be identified which further increases the chance of success. Constant review about where we are is also needed. This ensures key milestones are achieved. Feedback collected can help to adjust the execution process.

As many finance leaders treat the decline phase as “harvest and run, it is not the case by active management through sunset. Let’s stop leaving money on the table by abandoning your own strategies too early.