Family Companies (II)

choi

Family firms | Business in the Blood; Companies controlled by founding families remain surprisingly important and look set to stay so. Economist, Nov 1, 2014.
www.economist.com/news/business/ ... t-and-look-set-stay

Quote:

“Family-controlled firms now make up 19% of the companies in the Fortune Global 500, which tracks the world’s largest firms by sales. That is up from 15% in 2005, according to new research by McKinsey, a consulting firm (which defines such firms as ones whose founders or their families have the biggest stake, of [sic; should be ‘or’] at least 18%, plus the power to appoint the chief executive). * * * This is largely because of rapid growth in big developing economies where family ownership is the norm among large businesses.

“China (where the proportion is about 40%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (35%) stand out for their relatively low share of [$1 billion-plus] family firms, because in both cases many large firms are state-owned.

“Of the American firms in the Fortune Global 500, 15% are family ones, only slightly less than in 2005. Among them is the world’s largest family firm, Walmart

My comment:
(a) “founding families retain a fair degree of control despite selling large stakes to outside investors. One way they have done so is through special classes of shares * * * Investors have accepted such arrangements as the price of getting a slice of these firms’ profits, but they rarely like them. Some institutional investors were unhappy, for example, when a deal struck years ago by her father allowed Ms Botín to succeed him in the chair at Santander shortly after his death in September[, 2014], even though the family owned only 2% of the bank.”
(i) About the Group. Santander Group, undated
www.santander.com/csgs/Satellite ... erca-del-Grupo.html
("Founded in 1857 in the Spanish town of Santander by 76 businessmen")
(ii) Obituary: Emilio Botín was the chairman of Banco Santander, which he built up into one of the world’s most successful banking groups. Daily Telegraph, Sept 15, 2014
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituar ... Botin-obituary.html
(“Banco Santander * * * came under the control of the Botín family in 1909, when Emilio’s grandfather took the chair, to be followed in 1950 by Emilio’s father”)
(iii) Santander Group was founded, and is based, in Santander, Spain.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santander,_Spain
(section 1 History)

(b) The graphic shows Taiwan’s Foxconn is the tenth “biggest family businesses” in the world. I am surprised, that it is deemed a family business at all. Terry GOU 郭 台銘, the founder, has two grown-up children (a son and a daughter) from the first wife (who died of breast cancer in 2005), as well as another pair of kids (a son and a daughter, born in 2010 and 2009, respectively). His adult children have declared lack of interest in running Foxconn.

(c) “Family firms are also less likely to load up on debt. An obvious exception, and an illustration of why most family capitalists fear debt, is the recent collapse of Espírito Santo. Massive debts turned the family-owned Portuguese financial conglomerate into one of Europe’s largest corporate failures, ending in a state bail-out of the bank at the group’s core.”
(i) Espírito Santo (disambiguation)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espírito_Santo_(disambiguation)
("Portuguese for the holy spirit")
(ii) Banco Espírito Santo
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banco_Espírito_Santo
(based in Lisbon; was the second largest private financial institution in Portugal in terms of net assets; section 1 History)

choi

(d) “Mr Buffett wants his son, Howard * * * to succeed him as chairman, and guardian of the firm’s culture. The elder Mr Buffett is such a big fan of family firms that he likes to buy them: in October he bought Van Tuyl Group, America’s largest family-owned car dealership chain. As with LVMH and Kering, two family-run French luxury-goods giants that have bought a number of European fashion houses, Mr Buffett’s spiel to founding families is: if you want to sell up but want your business’s culture preserved, it will be in safe hands with us.”
(i) Van Tuyl
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Tuyl
(a Dutch surname; “The family name derives from the ancient village of Tuil (Tuÿl [is the former spelling, which still is used in present-day DUTCH surname]), in the central Netherlands”)
(ii) About Us. Van Tuyl Group, undated
www.vantuylgroup.com/index.htm
(“Van Tuyl Group, Inc. provides management consulting services to the largest group of privately held automotive dealerships in the United States. With offices in Arizona, Kansas, and Texas, the management consulting group works with approximately 70 independently operated dealerships nationwide. The Van Tuyl family has had a long history with the automotive industry, starting with Cecil Van Tuyl and a Kansas City Chevrolet dealership in 1955. Joined by his son Larry in 1971, they have built a world class management consulting company based on the principles of hiring the right people and giving their dealership clients the right tools, training and support they need to succeed”)

There is no Wikipedia page for it.
(iii) Kering
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kering
(founded in 1963 by François Pinault [1936- ] and is now run by his son François-Henri Pinault; Headquarters  Paris; section 1.4 Renaming to Kering)

choi

(e) “In some cases even strong and successful firms can implode soon after a generational succession, which is why so many countries have some variation of the saying, ‘from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations’ (clogs to clogs, kimono to kimono).”
(i) shirtsleeve (n): "the sleeve of a shirts
— in one's shirtsleeves or in shirtsleeves: wearing a shirt but no coat"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shirtsleeve
(ii) clogs to clogs in three generations
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clogs_to_clogs_in_three_generations
(iii)
(A) shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, from
Elizabeth Knowles, The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2006
www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O214-shrtslvstshrtslvsnthrgnrt.html
(B) Richard M Segal, Shirt Sleeves to Shirt Sleeves in Three Generations. Corp! magazine, July 1, 2008.
www.corpmagazine.com/special-int ... -three-generations/
(“is an American translation of a Lancashire proverb, ‘there’s nobbut three generations atween a clog and clog’”)

* nobbut (adv): "Nothern English  Nothing but; just <he looked a lot like his uncle when he was nobbut a lad>"
www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/nobbut
* atween (prep or adv; Middle English atwene, from 1a- + -twene (as in between):
"now dialectal  BETWEEN"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/atween
(C) “kimono to kimono” is what native speakers of English made up, modeling after the proceeding proverbs--and not found in Japan. Japanese proverbs to that effects are as follows.
*  三代続けば末代続く さんだいつづけばまつだいつづく
my translation: If family fortune lasts three generations, it will last till the last generation [ie, forever].
*  長者三代
ちょうじゃさんだい

chōja 長者 【ちょうじゃ】 (n): "millionaire"
* 名家三代続かず

meika 名家 【めいか】 (n): "distinguished family"
zu ず = not
* 売り家と唐様で書く三代目
translation: The third generation writes "house for sale" in the calligraphic style of scholars. (This is an idiom of Edo era--quite recent, in other words.)

uriya or uri-i-e 売り家; 売家 【うりや; うりいえ】 (n): "house for sale"
karayō 唐様 【からよう】 (n): "Chinese style"  (or: "中国風の書体。特に、江戸時代の学者間で流行した、元・明(みん)風の書体" 大辞泉)

choi

(f) “Some families are adept at training the next generation to work in the family firm. Illycaffé, a coffee-maker now run by a third-generation Illy family member, has a pact setting the rules for when an Illy can go into the business: competence for the job is paramount. Sweden’s Wallenberg business empire is run by a fifth generation of the founding family: two cousins, Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg, were groomed from an early age to run the group’s industrial and financial sides respectively.”
(i) Illy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illy
(founder’s grandson "Andrea Illy is currently the chairman and CEO")
(ii) Wallenberg family
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallenberg_family
("Jakob Persson Wallberg (1699–1758) married twice. The children of his first marriage called themselves Wallberg and those of his second called themselves Wallenberg"/In 2006, the fifth generation took over the Wallenberg sphere)
(A) The Swedish surname Wallenberg: “composed of the elements wall + the suffix - en (originally German) + berg ‘mountain’, ‘hill’”
Dictionary of American Family Names, by Oxford University Press
(B) German English dictionary
* wall (n; plural form wallen): “wall”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wallen

(g) “Even when they have agreed to let an outside manager run their businesses, families sometimes find it hard to keep their hands away from the wheel. Luxottica, an Italian maker of sunglasses, was well run by a professional chief executive for ten years, but recently lost him, and six weeks later his successor, reportedly following differences of opinion with the founder, Leonardo Del Vecchio, and his wife, Nicoletta Zampillo.”
(i) Leonardo Del Vecchio (1935- ) in 1961 started Luxottica (now based in Milan). The company says the company name means “for sun.” I do not see how: “sun” in Italian is noun masculine “sole.” And the Italian and Latin for “light” is “luce” and “lux” (both being nouns feminine), respectively.
(ii) The Italian and Jewish (from Italy) surname Del Vecchio): “literally ‘of or belonging to the old one’ (see Vecchio), hence a name denoting the son, associate, or servant of a man dubbed ‘The Old Man.’ According to tradition this name was taken by various Jewish families long established in Italy (allegedly since the capture of Jerusalem by the Romans in ad70) to distinguish themselves from later arrivals who migrated there on being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula after 1492”
(iii) vecchio (adjective masculine; ultimately from Latin adjective vetus old)
"old"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vecchio

The English noun “veteran” also comes from Latin vetus.