01
Owner earnings per share
Growth in owner earnings per share, measured over rolling five-year periods.
Philosophy
Our owner's manual.
Ten principles we commit to in writing before we buy anything. They are not values on a wall; they are the terms on which we own.
A letter
Zug, 2026
Dear reader,
There are two ways to own a company. You can own it in order to sell it, or you can own it in order to own it. Almost all professional capital in Europe belongs to the first kind. It is competent capital, often patient by its own standards, but it has a date in the contract — and a date changes behaviour long before it arrives.
JAD Holding AG was formed to be the second kind. Three shareholders, one balance sheet, no fund structure, no investment period, no obligation to return capital to anyone. We buy majority stakes in profitable European industrial companies with the intention of never selling them, and we finance the next purchase out of the cash the last ones generate.
Our advantage is not that we are cleverer than the funds. It is that we are allowed to be slower. We can let a managing director spend on a machine that pays back in nine years. We can keep a factory in a village because the workforce is there. We can hold cash for a year when nothing is worth buying — the most underrated capital-allocation decision there is.
We would rather earn twelve per cent for thirty years than thirty per cent for three.
Our second advantage is geographic, and it is unusual. One of our shareholders is rooted in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in a region that is building water, energy and industrial infrastructure at a scale Europe has not seen in fifty years. The companies we buy make exactly the components that build it. We do not need to invent a growth story for them; we need to introduce them.
If you are an owner reading this because you are thinking about succession: we will tell you honestly and quickly whether we are the right owner for your company. If we are not, we will say so in a fortnight, and you will have lost nothing but an afternoon.
Owner's manual
Ten principles. We expect to be held to them.
An investor holds a position. An owner carries a responsibility for the people, the customers and the name. We behave as the second, which means we read the accounts of our companies like people who will still be reading them in twenty years.
We do not model an exit, because we do not plan one. A sale would only happen if a business permanently lost its economic reason to exist — and even then we would first ask whether we were the ones who broke it.
Pricing, hiring, products, customers, suppliers, day-to-day investment: the managing director decides. Head office has no operating committee, no shared-services department and no synergy programme. We have never seen a group headquarters improve a working factory.
Cash that a subsidiary can reinvest at an attractive return stays with the subsidiary. Cash that it cannot comes to Zug, where it competes with every other use: another acquisition, a plant, debt repayment, or simply waiting. This is the single job we insist on doing ourselves.
We will not lever a company to the point where a bad year becomes an existential year. A permanent owner that can be forced to sell by a covenant is not a permanent owner. We accept a lower return for the right to be unbothered in a recession.
No financing condition that can collapse three weeks before signing, no earn-out designed to claw back part of the price, no purchase-price adjustment you need a lawyer to understand. A clean structure is worth more to a retiring owner than the last two per cent of the price.
We make one offer that reflects what the business is worth to us, and we explain how we arrived at it. We do not open low to negotiate up, and we do not re-trade after due diligence unless we find something that was not disclosed.
Where they wish, managers can hold a stake in their own company alongside us. Compensation is tied to the returns of the business they actually run, not to a group share price and not to the size of their budget.
Revenue, headcount and the number of companies in the group are inputs, not results. What we track is cash earnings per share after the investment a business genuinely needs, and the return we earn on every additional franc we put to work.
We do not rebrand the companies we buy, we do not put our logo on their letterhead, and we do not merge them into a platform. A brand that took forty years to earn is an asset. Erasing it is a write-off nobody books.
Scorecard
How we would like to be judged.
Four measures, reported to our shareholders annually and to our managers in plain language.
02
Return on new capital
The return we earn on every additional franc of capital we allocate.
03
Managers who stay
Managing directors who are still with us five years after we acquired their company.
04
Companies sold
A number we intend to keep at zero for as long as the group exists.
Process
From first call to signature in eight weeks.
Day 0
One conversation
A mutual NDA, signed both ways before anything else. You tell us what the company does and what you want to happen to it. We tell you within the hour whether it fits.
Days 1–10
Reading, not diligence
Three years of annual accounts and one page on the business. No data room, no adviser team, no management presentation. Two people read it: the CEO and one board member.
Day 10
A written answer
Either a clear no with our reasons, or an indicative offer with the price, the structure and the owner's charter attached. Both are one page. Both are binding on us in the way we describe.
Weeks 3–7
Confirmatory diligence
Financial, legal and tax confirmation with one adviser team, run to a fixed timetable. We confirm what you told us; we do not go looking for reasons to reduce the price.
Week 8
Signing and payment
Purchase price in cash at closing. The owner's charter — name, location, workforce, management authority — is an annex to the share purchase agreement, not a promise over dinner.
The Monday after
Nothing happens
No integration project, no new reporting system, no consultants in the canteen. One page of figures a month, one visit a quarter, and a phone number that is answered by a shareholder.
Domicile
Why Switzerland.
A holding that sits between European family companies and Gulf capital needs a jurisdiction both sides trust without negotiation. Switzerland is that jurisdiction, and Zug has been the home of industrial holdings for a century.
I
Neutral ground
Neither an EU nor a GCC entity. Contracts, arbitration and shareholder agreements under Swiss law are accepted in Stuttgart and in Riyadh alike.
II
Stability we can plan against
A holding that intends to own companies for thirty years needs a legal and monetary environment that will still be recognisable in thirty years.
III
A clean cap table
Three shareholders, one class of registered shares, a shareholders' agreement with no exit clause. Everyone involved knows exactly who decides what.