Owner families of South Korea's top 100 conglomerates hold more than 150 trillion won ($133 billion) in shares with over 30 percent of the amount already bequeathed to their children, a corporate tracker said Wednesday.
The combined value of shareholdings controlled by the owner families stood at 152.4 trillion won as of Friday, according to CEO Score.
Sons and daughters of the conglomerate heads held 49.4 trillion won worth of shares in their subsidiaries, or 32.4 percent of the total value. The figure was up 1.5 percentage points from a year earlier.
(Yonhap)
Family-controlled conglomerates are called chaebol in South Korea, and their chairmen are often referred to as "owners." The founding families usually control top managerial positions with only a handful of stakes through a web of cross-shareholdings among subsidiaries.
The proportion was 39.4 percent for three scions of South Korea's top chaebol Samsung Group -- Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong and his two sisters.
Lee is Samsung's de facto head as a 2015 merger of two Samsung units virtually completed the leadership succession at the family-run business empire from ailing patriarch Lee Kun-hee to Jae-yong, after the elder Lee fell into a coma in 2014.
The comparable portion was 43.2 percent for Hyundai Motor Group, the country's No. 2 family-controlled conglomerate, with Taeyoung and five other chaebol having numbers exceeding 90 percent.
CEO Score said the "asset succession ratio" hovered about 50 percent for 28 conglomerates. (Yonhap)
