92 year old Sumner Redstone recently ousted Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman and Viacom director George Abrams, as trustees of the entity that will have voting control of Viacom and CBS upon Redstone’s death or incapacity. He also removed them as directors of National Amusements, the private holding company that holds his 80% voting stake in [...]
Bechtel Corporation is the largest construction and civil engineering firm, as well as the 5th-largest privately owned company in the United States. It was founded by Warren A Bechtel in 1898. Over the last 118 years this family run business has completed a number of signature projects including the Hoover dam (1936); Trans-Arabian pipeline (1950); [...]
Campden research studied the wholly-owned US family businesses and found that the top 13 among them were dominant in a select few sectors. If they were a nation, their GDP (i.e. total revenues of $232 bn) would be 45th largest on the globe. The sectors where these family businesses were found dominant included 'agriculture, food [...]
The Swiss biopharmaceutical company Debiopharm Group has pledged to setup a Chair in Family Philanthropy at IMD business school, Lausanne. The Chair's objective is to promote family philanthropy and developing best practices by offering decision-making techniques and performance assessment mechanisms to improve the social and financial impact of family giving. Explaining the motivation behind the [...]
Continuing the family legacy, Carlos Slim, head of one of the world's largest family business empires has brought two of his grandchildren on the boards of group companies. Daniel and Rodrigo, both in their early 20s, are sons of Slim's eldest daughter Vanessa. Daniel has been appointed to the board of Minera Frisco, a publicly [...]
Adam Benckiser had started a namesake chemical company in 1823. He was succeeded by his son-in-law Ludwig Reimann. Albert Reimann Jr., the great grandson of Ludwig took the reins of the company after his father died in 1952. Upon Albert's death in 1984, Wolfgang Reimann and eight other heirs each inherited 11.1% of JAB Holding [...]
The Cyrus Mistry led Tata group is pushing for innovation across 120 companies to help marry technology, digital and innovation under one roof. The group has already doubled published patents in two years, from about 3,500 at end of 2013 to about 7,000 at 2015 end. Currently about 2.7% of the group's turnover is being [...]
Auto parts maker, Minth, was established in 1992 by Taiwanese billionaire Chin Jong Hwa. The company based in the city of Ningbo, has plants in China, South East Asia and North America. It designs, manufactures, processes, develops, and sells automobile body parts and moulds of passenger cars to major carmakers such as Volkswagen, General Motors, [...]
Bouygues S.A., an industrial group headquartered in Paris, was founded in 1952 by Francis Bouygues and since 1989 has been led by his son Martin Bouygues. In 2015 it had over approximately 120,000 employees in 100 countries, generating €32.428 billion in revenue. The group specializes in construction (Colas and Bouygues Construction), real estate development (Bouygues [...]
The country’s medium-sized enterprises, often family owned, generate a quarter of private sector GDP, despite making up just 2% of British companies. British family businesses are more domestically focused than their global counterparts, with exports accounting for just 16% of their revenues, compared to 25% internationally, according to the PwC Family Business Survey. However these [...]