A Reassessment of the Growth, Performance and Strategy in 300 UK Holding Companies

Introduction Industrial holding companies continue to play an important role in the development of many Western style economies. These institutions take a wide variety of forms to accomplish their principal objective, namely the control and management of multi‐company systems which normally span a wide range of industrial sectors. They are more typically found in Europe and Japan than in the US, where both legal constraints and the pursuit of managerial efficiency have resulted in the dominance of the large scale integrated, multi‐unit corporation as an organisational form. Within Europe, especially in Belgium and France, inter‐market conglomerates and holding companies maintain an important position in some of the more basic sectors of the economy—including banking, insurance, transport, public utilities, basic metals and construction. In both these countries however, these are characteristically financial institutions managing a portfolio of stocks in order to exercise control over the companies in which they hold equity capital.