CASE 2 (A Case in Japan)

■ Profile

Founding family of a listed company

Family: a structure formed by the founder (first generation) and the family (second generation).

Market capitalization: several hundred billion yen (roughly a few billion US dollars).

Founding family's related ownership: approximately 40%.

Current situation: a structure in which the company's own shares are held through multiple asset management companies — under the founder individually, under asset management companies, and under the names of individual family members.

■ The consultation

Considering whether to build an investment-oriented family office.

In the course of examining how an investment-oriented family office should be run, they sought advice on the sense of cost involved, and on how such an organization actually operates in practice.

■ A challenge specific to founding families

They already held an ordinary asset management company, so a founding family's asset-management structure was in place. However, they did not have a full investment-oriented family office — one with people responsible for investment, research, finance, and administration. The questions, therefore, were whether a family office was truly necessary, and if so, what scale of structure was needed, and what level of cost would be reasonable.

■ The key questions

The issue is not whether or not to create a family office. For that founding family, what degree of asset-management structure is needed? What size of team? What functions should it have? In other words, what matters is designing the model that fits that particular family.

■ The solution

At PLUTO, rather than simply supporting the establishment of a family office, we provide advisory work on designing an asset-management structure suited to each founding or owner family's situation — organizing the necessary functions, considering the team structure, setting the approach to using external specialists, and balancing cost against function.

Where a full investment-oriented family office is genuinely needed, we take this on as a long-term engagement.