Investing for the Long Run : The Rise and Fall of Société Générale de Belgique, 1835-1988

The Société Générale de Belgique dominated the Belgian economy for more than 150 years. It invested for the long run in a portfolio of listed and private companies as the world’s first universal bank (pre-1935) and as holding company (post-1935). This paper presents a quantitative analysis to better understand the reversal in the company’s prominence. By introducing hand-collected data from its balance sheet and investment portfolio, we show that the performance was driven by the private equity portfolio, both during its success (pre-1935) and its decline (post-1935), and by the declining Colonial investments (post-1935)