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Corporate Strategy in Family Business Groups in Developed Economies

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The Palgrave Handbook of Managing Family Business Groups

Abstract

This study aims at mapping the corporate strategies of Family Business Groups (FBGs) in the context of developed economies. Particularly, we analyze (i) how FBGs are structured and the degree of control on their investee companies, and (ii) which are their diversification strategies –product and geographic diversification strategies. The research setting is based on a sample of 238 FBGs in Catalonia, a propitious ecosystem for the prevalence of family business −88% of all Catalan companies are family-owned. Moreover, the Catalan economy is larger than that of most countries in the Eurozone and, thus, studying the Catalan context is representative of developed economies. We use an exploratory descriptive approach to understand which corporate strategies develop Catalan FBGs. Catalan FBGs are mainly small -in terms of the number of investee companies- and semi-pyramidal -with up to three hierarchical levels. Two-thirds of these FBGs are internationalized and almost half of them can be considered as globalizing-multinationals. Regarding their product diversification, Catalan FBGs operate in more than four subsectors and, on average, their parent-investee dyads exhibit a high level of industrial distance. This exploratory study joins the scarce body of research analyzing FBGs from developed economies and contributes to the strategy literature by showing how FBGs, a specific type of organization, undertake their corporate strategies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the literature, the concepts of “headquarters”, “apex firm,” and “parent company” have been used indistinctively to refer to the company at the top of the organizational structure in a business group. The same for the concepts of “subsidiaries”, “affiliates,” and “investees” for the member firms in a business group, although we stress some of the main differences between them in the sections below.

  2. 2.

    Technical note. Ownership and other information about the 238 GUOs were retrieved from SABI database, but these 238 GUOs must appear in Amadeus database in order to track international (mostly European) investees.

  3. 3.

    Disclaimer. For the sample of FBGs, we have considered firms in Catalonia after October 2017, date when the Catalonia Independence Referendum was proclaimed.

  4. 4.

    Pseudo-holding companies refer to real estate holding companies, which are a popular mechanism that some business groups use to avoid risks from owning investment properties, providing also asset protection, privacy, and, sometimes, even tax benefits.

  5. 5.

    Note that any investment below 10% is a financial investment, thus, we do not consider financial investments as affiliates or subsidiaries.

  6. 6.

    As we deal with non-listed companies, we do not have information about company assets, sales, and employees abroad. Therefore, due to data limitations, it is not possible for us to estimate the depth of internationalization.

  7. 7.

    There is a small difference between the total number of investee companies (N = 9161) and the total number reported in Table 5.28. The difference equals 0.14% of the sample without information about the geographic location.

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Mendoza, X., Infantes, P.M., Parada, M.J., Rautiainen, M., Hohberger, J. (2023). Corporate Strategy in Family Business Groups in Developed Economies. In: Rautiainen, M., Parada, M.J., Pihkala, T., Akhter, N., Discua Cruz, A., Mukherjee, K. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Managing Family Business Groups. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13206-3_5

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