The Ownership Structure of Family Firms - an Empirical Study of Hungarian Agri-Food Family Enterprises

Tobak, Júlia

Keywords: Keywords: definition, generations, ownership categories, expert interviews, case study, Q0, Q1

One can talk about family business if the notions of family, ownership and business are closely connected to each other, namely if the business is in the possession of the family, managed and controlled by the family members. A family owned company is a business where a family has the majority ownership and/or the majority management and at least one family member actively works in the firm, the family owns the business.
The study contains the results of research on the ownership structure of family owned businesses. The examined family businesses are interested in long-term preservation of values, thus succession of generations plays a key role in their case. They attach great importance how the ownership structure develops.
The methodology used to investigate the ownership structures of family businesses involved 13 expert interviews were conducted between November 2016 and October 2017 with owners and next generations of family owned agri-food enterprises in Hungary. A case study has been prepared too in this topic with the participation of various types of companies (production, service, trade).
In order to classify the analysed companies, six categories of ownership were developed. These are non-owner, emotional owner, partial owner, controlling owner, majority owner and exclusive/sole owner. Each generation of the analysed family businesses were classified to these categories.
According to the results the analysed family owned companies are sharing the property within family. Typically the Senior generation has partial and majority ownership while the Next Generation’s ownership proportion is increasing. There are only two interviewed companies whose case we can talk about exclusive/sole ownership.
FB researches are related with many disciplines as anthropology, economic science, social psychology, sociology and psychology. Because of the diversity of the topic further research and analytical work is needed to outline the Hungarian situation.

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