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Abstract
This study uses family entrepreneurial orientation to explain longevity and trans-generational value creation in Trenor y Cía., a Spanish family firm that remained in business for over three generations from 1838 to 1926. While the entrepreneurial view of the family was evident under the patriarch’s leadership, this was more remarkable when the second-generation introduced innovative industrial processes; furthermore, the family was actively engaged in other firms, before, during and after Trenor y Cía. When the Trenors managed to integrate into the Spanish nobility through marriage, the ennobled-entrepreneurs did not change their attitudes towards business and contributed to economic progress. The Trenor family also pursued non-financial goals to maintain socioemotional wealth, and played a key role in both society and politics. This analysis contradicts the view that family firms are often a burden for progress and confirms that they have bivalent attributes that can be managed to achieve net benefits.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the valuable oral testimony of the current Marquis of Turia, Tomás Trenor Puig. They also very grateful to him for allowing them access to some unpublished documents about his ancestors written by himself.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Estadística Administrativa de la Contribución Industrial y de Comercio, including País Vasco and Navarra (Nadal, Citation1987, 1990).
2 We will use the Spanish version of the first name, Tomás, as well as two surnames, father and mother respectively, as this is the Spanish legal tradition.
3 The new company name perfectly illustrates the ‘survival’ idea; it keeps between brackets the prior-firm name; it reads ‘previously Trenor y Cía.’
4 The company continued until 1982 in the hands of three new partners, and was acquired by Rafia Industrial S.A. (Frechina, et al. Citation2017. p. 171).
5 In the Boletín Oficial de la Provincia (1852), the Marquis of Mirasol appeared in third place in the list of the main tax contributors of the Valencia province, with a contribution of 4.193 pesetas (16,772 reales de vellón) (Picó López, Citation1976, pp.174-176). As Carmona Pidal (1995, p. 66) reports, in 1857 nine out of the ten largest contributors were nobles (while by 1875, their participation was reduced to 41%).
6 According to Licini (Citation1994) for much of the nineteenth century, the endurance, of the nobility’s social and economic power was still based on large-scale land ownership, which usually represented the majority of the nobility’s assets and in many cases was extended or reinforced. Wiener (Citation1981) has gone even further, arguing that not only did the aristocracy remain aloof, but that they inculcated their own anti-business views into the middle class, which became more concerned with entering the group than with pursuing the logic of its own economic concerns (in Beckett, Citation1988, p. 281).
7 As stated by López-Manjón (Citation2009, p. 32), in the nineteenth century the Spanish aristocracy remained linked to land exploitation and did not take the initiative in the creation of companies. However, Rueda (Citation2014, p. 5) affirms that the Spanish ennobled aristocracy behaved differently from the old nobility, since it was only the latter that had a traditional behaviour until the early twentieth century, and according to Ruiz Pérez (Citation1988) in the Valencian region the recent nobility of bourgeois origin obtained titles while promoting agrarian capitalism.
8 In ‘El viaje del Rey a Valencia’, La Correspondencia de Valencia, March 28, 1905.
9 Safor and Marina are two regions in the Valencia province.
10 Interestingly, nowadays the town hall and the local archive are held in the building where Trenor y Cía. had the silk business.
11 There are no clear references in the Spanish legislation to private companies with limited liability until the twentieth century. While the existence of limited liability companies was already contemplated in the 1829 Commercial Code, there were severe limitations to establish such companies; moreover, the social and political changes that took place during the nineteenth century did not help to pass legal measures to promote such companies, thus although two laws were issued in 1848 and 1869, the first was abolished in 1868 and the second was not very effective. The new Commercial Code approved in 1885 opened the possibility to establish this type of company once more, but it was only in 1951 when the Law on Limited Companies was passed (Giner Inchausti, Citation1995).
12 Ana Patricia Botín-Sanz de Sautuola O'Shea, who is currently the chair of Banco de Santander, is a descendant of his brother William.
13 The eighteenth century is considered the ‘Golden Age’ of silk spinning in the Valencia region, and the Vinalesa factory that started production in 1770 was one of the most relevant centres (Aguilar Cervera, Citation1983, pp. 62-64).
14 Trenor Puig (2004, p. 139, table 1) mentions the following anecdote about Tomás Trenor Keating when visiting the school where your son was studying in England ‘and after meeting with the director of the school and learning about his son’s progress and situation and observing him through the window, he declined to see him personally so as not to distract him’.
15 In Trenor y Cía., the accounting period began on July 1 and ended on June 30.
16 The three figures correspond to pesos de plata, reales de vellón and maravedíes de vellón respectively, similar to the division of the sterling pound in shillings and pence. One peso de plata was 15 reales de vellón and two maravedíes de vellón, and one real de vellón was 34 maravedíes de vellón, thus one peso de plata was 512 maravedíes de vellón; four reales de vellón made one peseta. The peseta was introduced in 1868 and lasted till the euro was introduced in Spain. For comparative purposes, this is the currency we are using in the text, and in brackets we show the one appearing in the original documents.
17 It was transformed into Banco Español de Crédito (Banesto) in 1901 (and disappeared in 2013 after being absorbed by Banco de Santander).
18 As figure 1 shows, Tomás Trenor Keating had four sons and a daughter; at that time the age of majority was 25, and women were not allowed to participate in business.
19 The participation of the chemical industry within the total economy in Valencia went from 2.39% in 1856 to 8.38% in 1900, and its weight was larger in this region than in the rest of Spain; besides chemical fertilizers, especially superphosphates, represented the most important item (Nadal, Citation1990).
20 As mentioned in the appraisal report, this figure is a ‘capital that at 5 per cent represented an interest of 9,876 pesetas, which is approximately what could be obtained from its lease’.
21 It had been bought by his father in 1838 when the Spanish confiscation took place, and the government expropriated and sold properties from the Catholic Church and religious orders. The property is still in the hands of the Trenor family.
22 By Royal Decree of September 12, 1879 Federico Trenor Buccelli obtained authorization to dry the marshes of Gandía, Xeraco and Teresa (all of them in the area of Valencia) in a period of two years, and thus put into cultivation hundreds of hectares of rich lands; his only son Federico Trenor Palavicino (who did not participate in Trenor y Cía.) developed this business later on. In the publication Gaceta Agrícola del Ministerio de Fomento (1879) Federico Trenor Buccelli is considered as one of the most respectable merchants and owners of Valencia, and to whom much of the progress of intensive cultivation is owed.
23 Two episodes illustrate the important role of the family, and its strong connection with the company. Thus, when White, Llano y Morand, rival of Trenor y Cía. in the guano business, was bankrupt, owing 250.000 pesetas (1.000.000 reales de vellón) to Trenor y Cía. As the main partner in the failing company was José de Llano, husband of their only sister, the debt was partially condoned (Pons & Serna, Citation1992). And, when Guillermo Mathews, the tutor of the second generation, established himself in London in 1869, he became correspondent of Trenor y Cía. (Trenor Puig, 2004, p. 129, see table 1).
24 In 1852 the line from Valencia to El Grao (the Valencia harbor) was inaugurated, which in 1859 was connected with the Madrid-Alicante line, and in 1862 promoted the Valencia-Castellón route. With these lines Valencia was well connected with the capital and other Mediterranean cities (Ródenas, Citation1978; Citation1982).
25 In the deed of December 29, 1911 Tomás Trenor Palavicino (who died two years later) was replaced by his brother Fernando.
26 Archivo Histórico Nacional: UNIVERSIDADES, 6235, Exp. 16.
27 La Correspondencia de Valencia, December 7, 1928.
28 Due to the absence of the accounting books (Journal and Ledger) of this period we are not able to explain either the decrease in capital compared with prior periods, or how the factory and other utilities were taken into consideration. It could be the case that they were rented, but this is only speculation. A couple of year later these assets were contributed to the firm.
29 In 1915 the fertilizer business was segregated from Trenor y Cía. and a new company was established, Sociedad Anónima de Abonos y Productos Químicos, in which Trenor y Cía. owned 80% (the fair value of the El Grao factory), the rest was in the hands of several members of the Trenor family. Circa 1925, that company was sold to Sociedad Anónima Cros (Nadal, Homs & Pagès, 19, p. 155), which at the time controlled almost half of the Spanish production of superphosphates.
30 La Esfera. Ilustración Mundial, July 14, 1917.
31 Ibérica. El Progreso de las Ciencias y de sus Aplicaciones, June 7, 1919.
32 Levante. El Mercantil Valenciano, September 26, 2010.
33 Las Provincias, August 20, 1920.
34 Further details about the Trenor family can be found in the family documents unpublished written by Tomás Trenor Puig in 1995 and 2004, which are referred in table 1.
35 He represented the Spanish government in an international congress on agriculture that took place in Vienna (La Correspondencia de Valencia, June 15, 1907).
36 King Alfonso XIII gave titles to other members of the Trenor family; Francisco Trenor Palavicino was the Count of Trenor, and in 1916 the King rehabilitated the title of Barony of Alacuás in favor of Federico Trenor Palavicino. No doubt the Trenor family remained considerably influential over the years. Two descendants of Tomás Trenor Keating were mayors of Valencia in the middle of the twentieth century.
37 The following anecdotes illustrate how much engrained in the local society was the Trenor family. Tomás Trenor Palavicino compromised his fortune in the deficit of the regional and national industrial fairs he promoted (600,000 pesetas) (La Correspondencia de España, March 22, 1913). The Trenors gave part of the garden in their castle-house to the municipality of Vinalesa to build a school (Archivo Municipal Vinalesa, Acta municipal, March 10, 1922). In commemoration of the visit of the King Alfonso XIII to El Grao factory in 1905, Trenor y Cía. gave 10 pesetas to each worker; 2,500 pesetas to the major; and another 2,500 pesetas to the priest to be distributed to the poor people in El Grao district (Las Provincias, April 19, 1905).
38 The three cousins invested 2,000,000 pesetas (the value of the properties, machines, vehicles and other tools received from the liquidation of Trenor y Cía.) and received 1,000 shares with a nominal value of 1,000 pesetas, and 2,000 bonds of nominal value 500 pesetas at 6%. The other partner invested 1,000,000 pesetas in cash and received 1,000 shares; the remaining 1,000 shares were considered treasury stock.
39 The fertilizer business had been already separated from Trenor y Cía., but another big change came with the abandonment of banking. After passing the Banking Ordinance Law in 1921, private bankers were starting to be replaced by the big banks that were established as limited companies (Titos, Citation1999, p. 113); Vinalesa (antes Trenor y Cía.) S.A. did not engage in this activity.
40 Nowadays, successors of the family own 8.5% of Coca-Cola European Partners, and 7.1% of Ebro Foods S.A., both leaders in their respective industries in Spain. According to Forbes in 2016, Juan-Luis Gómez Trenor, who died in 2017, was number 14 in the ranking of richest families in Spain and owned the second largest fortune in the Valencia Region (El País, January 23, 2017).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Begoña Giner
Begoña Giner is full professor in Accounting and Finance at the University of Valencia (Spain). Her research interests cover the role of financial reporting and disclosure, corporate social responsibility, business history and accounting history. She has been the President of the European Accounting Association. Her research has been published in Abacus, Accounting and Business Research, Accounting in Europe, De Computis, European Accounting Review, Revista de Historia Industrial, Journal of Business Ethics, Accounting, Social and Environmental Accountability Journal, among others.
Amparo Ruiz
Amparo Ruiz is lecturer in Accounting and Finance at the University of Valencia (Spain). Doctor in Economics and Business Sciences. Her research interests focuses on disclosure and financial reporting, business history, and accounting history. She has published several articles in the areas of financial accounting, industrial history, and accounting history.