A regular update on what the Highworth Research team is doing to shed light on the once-secretive world of single-family offices in the UK, and other parts of the world.

The shifting world of UK-based single- and multi-family offices is captured in the latest updates from Highworth Research, the database with which this news service is exclusive media partner. 

Highworth carries data – obtained from public sources – from hundreds of single-family offices around the world (it recently started a new service focused on the North American market). The scale and depth of its data meant, for example, that WealthBriefing got the scoop about the family office made by the creators of the BioNTech vaccine for Covid-19, for example. 

A family office linked to the children of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch; an office connected to the Marshall family that owns the aerospace and defence engineering business, and the Samworth food manufacturing dynasty, are among the latest to be added to Highworth’s records. 

Highworth also added names from Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Spain, the United Arab Emirates and the UK. The firm has also updated information about major entities such as Group Arnault, the family office of French billionaire Bernard Arnault.

As the updates show, Macdoch UK is one of the two family offices of Prudence Murdoch, the eldest of the six children of Rupert Murdoch, with her other family office being in Australia and having a different asset allocation strategy from her British one.

The Macdoch UK and Macdoch Australia family offices collectively are estimated to manage between $500 million and $1.5 billion, not including Prudence Murdoch’s share of the proceeds of the 21st Century Fox sale to Disney in 2019, which is separately held through the Murdoch Family Trust, and which in January 2023 was worth around $1.73 billion.

In the case of the Marshall family, it has a venture capital investment arm called Martlet Capital. Martlet invests in pre-seed and seed-stage companies in deep tech and life sciences, many of them spin-outs from Cambridge University.

A minority stake in Martlet was sold to a consortium including EMV Capital and Saranac Partners, a private office and corporate finance firm. Martlet Capital has a portfolio of 65 tech companies but has had only seven exits over the past 11 years – a good example of patient capital. 

In the third example, Samworth Family Office, acts for the heirs of the late Sir David Samworth who died last year. The Samworth family owns Samworth Brothers (Holdings), a Leicester, UK, food manufacturing company with revenues in 2022 of £1.16 billion.

Highworth updates also refer to Seek Holdings, the family office of Simon Nixon, co-founder in 1993 of the offline moneysupermarket service which in 1999 became the online moneysupermarket.com. 

To register for the Highworth database and find out more, click on this link. 

If you have stories about the family offices industry, email tom.burroughes@wealthbriefing.com