“We want to invent another transmission path”: foundations, ever more credible shareholders

In France, more and more managers are committing to the creation of shareholder foundations in anticipation of the transfer of their company. Clearly, they give a more or less large part of the shares of their company, often family-owned, to a foundation with a philanthropic purpose, in place of more lucrative transfers.

“There is an almost indecent side to the fact that the company and the value created only accrue to two shareholders,” estimates Anne Leitzgen, cited in a report on these foundations published by the Prophil firm in June 2026, in relation to the furniture manufacturer Schmidt Groupe of which she is president. Anne Leitzgen and Caroline Leitzgen, the chairwoman of the supervisory board, are the granddaughters of Hubert Schmidt, the founder of the group, and the ultra-majority shareholders of the group. Like the cybersecurity company Advens, the agri-food brand Who’s the Boss? ! or the tea distributor Palais des thés, Schmidt Groupe plans to use a shareholder foundation which could hold up to a third of its capital. “We want to invent another path of transmission and, above all, of sharing value with the collective,” continues Anne Leitzgen.

These multiple projects show a growing interest among business leaders for this shareholder model, which is still rare in France but much more widespread in Denmark, where there are around 1,400 shareholder foundations, or in Germany for example. In France, only four shareholder foundations were identified in 2015. Ten years later, their number jumped to 38, according to the census carried out by Prophil. They represent nearly 28 billion euros in cumulative turnover and 98,000 employees. By adding the companies committed to joining the movement, around fifty companies are attracted by this shareholder model.

Of the 38 current shareholder foundations, more than half exercise control over the company owned or are intended to do so. “To claim to be a shareholder foundation, this notion of control is decisive according to European research,” underlines Virginie Seghers, the president of Prophil. However, our study goes beyond this strict definition and takes into account foundations which hold only 5% of the capital. » In fact, the shareholder foundation, most of which is constituted in the legal form of an endowment fund in France, coexists in 53% of cases with family shareholding, in 42% of cases with employee shareholding and in 8% of cases with investment funds. More than 70% of shareholder foundations concern SMEs or mid-sized companies.

The industry is an important breeding ground with companies such as the pallet manufacturer Archimbaud, the skin care product manufacturer Naos, the carpentry specialist Cetih, the organic product manufacturer Léa Nature, Monin syrups, etc.

For its promoters, the shareholder foundation is a means of developing a stable, long-term shareholder base that promotes the local anchoring of the company. In France, “industrial companies disappear one after the other or are bought by foreign groups. The foundation recognized as a shareholder of public utility [another legal form than the endowment fund, editor's note] is a way that is still too little known to preserve our industries in our territories,” considers Michel Etchebest, the founder of the industrial group Artzainak which is 76% owned by a foundation, in the Prophil study.

Machine-translated from French