The statistics on the survival of family businesses are not encouraging to Nosy Tarsee. A study by the Family Business Institute found that only about 30 percent of family businesses survive into the second generation, while roughly 12 percent make it to the third.
The Gucci family lost control of their own brand after decades of litigation, tax evasion charges, and a murder.
The Bancrofts sold The Wall Street Journal after successive generations grew dependent on dividends while losing interest in governance.
The problem is rarely incompetence but structural. Ownership and management expertise are not the same thing, but family businesses often treat them as if they were.
The family business dynamic is playing out in a governance dispute currently before the Securities and Exchange Commission involving a certain publishing house.
Founded in the early 1950s, the company has long supplied textbooks to millions of public school students across the archipelago.
A verified complaint filed in November 2025 by a reinstated company official alleged that fictitious invoices from paper suppliers totaling nearly P3 billion were recorded in the firm’s books between 2003 and 2014.
At least P1.6 billion has been identified in the complaint as traceable to alleged ghost suppliers.
The SEC has ordered three siblings who collectively hold a majority of the shares to respond to the allegations. They have not publicly addressed the substance of the complaint. The proceedings are ongoing.
What the case reveals, regardless of its eventual outcome, is that family-owned businesses rarely confront the question of who speaks for the institution in the event of family infighting.
The publishing house was established to produce educational materials. Its textbooks have been in classrooms for generations.
That is an institutional legacy with a public dimension, not merely a private asset to be managed or distributed among heirs. The founders of durable family enterprises understood this distinction.
The ones who built systems to preserve the institution beyond their lifetimes understood that what they were building was not theirs alone.
That understanding does not automatically transfer through inheritance. This particular case, whatever the SEC finds, will be studied for what it reveals about governance in local family corporations.
The more useful question for those watching is not what a party did or did not do. It is what structures were in place to prevent this kind of dispute from reaching a government regulator in the first place.
The answer applies to every family business in this country with an heir waiting in the wings.