Investment AB LatourFigures

At 31 December 2025, the Douglas family and its companies hold 76.1% of Latour's capital and 79.3% of the voting rights. This is not a controlling stake in the usual sense of the word: it is outright majority ownership, and everything that follows must be read with that fact in mind.

Latour has two classes of shares, like most of Sweden's large industrial families. The A share carries ten votes, the B share one. A shares account for only 7.4% of the capital but 44.6% of the votes: an investor who bought every B share in issue, that is 92.6% of the company, would command only 55.4% of the votes. The leverage is therefore considerable in principle. At Latour, however, it does almost nothing. The family holds 84.0% of the A shares, but the bulk of its block is in B shares, ten times less powerful. Without the two-class system it would carry 76.07% of the votes instead of 79.24%, both recalculated: multiple voting rights add 3.2 points, no more.

Describing Latour as a textbook case of control through multiple voting rights would therefore be wrong. Control comes first from the size of the block. That is the opposite of an Investor AB or an Industrivärden, where a reference shareholder holds a minority of the capital and a majority of the votes. For a Latour minority shareholder the difference is sharp: there is no wedge between capital and power whose narrowing could be hoped for. There is a majority owner, and that is all. The stock of A shares can in any case only shrink, since the articles allow an A share to be converted into a B share, once a year before 30 November, and never the other way round.

Two facts complete the picture. The block has not moved in fifteen years: the Swedish regulator records a single threshold crossing on Latour since its database opened in 2007, that of July 2011, which then showed 76.84% of the capital and 79.71% of the votes, a drift of 1.3 and 0.4 points over fourteen and a half years. And control is split between three family branches rather than concentrated in one pair of hands: Eric Douglas 33.38% of the capital, Carl Douglas 33.06%, Elisabeth Douglas 9.68%. None holds a majority alone, so the continuity of control depends on agreement between them as much as on law. The board has nine directors, six of them independent of both the company and the controlling shareholder; the audit committee is the entire board; and the committee that proposes directors is half made up of family representatives, chaired by Jan Svensson, chief executive of Latour from 2003 to 2019.