The company that began in Alba in 1946 now owns WK Kellogg’s cereals, answers on a British company register to a single name, and is chaired by a novelist with eight books to his name.
Ask who owns Nutella and the answer is usually “a family”. The instinct is sound, since Ferrero was founded in Alba in 1946 and is marking eighty years in family hands. Yet the one public register anyone can read that must name a person in control of a Ferrero company, the British one, names exactly one. He gave up the chief executive’s job in 2017.
That makes any valuation of Giovanni Ferrero a sum done from the pavement. Ferrero is a private company, and while it publishes group turnover and headcount, it does not publish how its Luxembourg holding company is divided, so outsiders value the business and then assume the stake. The true figure is known only to the family and its advisers.
The figure with a name and a date
Forbes put him at $46.4bn on 6 November 2026 and ranks him 41st on its 2026 billionaires list. The estimate tracks the imagined price of a company that has never been offered for sale, so it rises and falls through the week without a single share changing hands.
When the asset is a private chocolate business, every number is a guess, and the most useful guess is the one with a name and a date attached.
Where the money comes from
Almost all of it comes from the group itself. Ferrero reported consolidated turnover of €19.3bn for the year to 31 August 2025 and employed 48,697 people at the year end; the WK Kellogg purchase has since taken the headcount past 50,000.
The results statement is quite precise about who does what. It credits “Executive Chairman Giovanni Ferrero” with the strategy and the chief executive, Lapo Civiletti, with carrying it out. Chairmen are usually happy to take credit for the weather. This one takes the strategy and leaves the delivery to Civiletti.
There is also a wider circle. Ferrero counts a separate set of “affiliated companies” that includes Ferrara, Nonni’s, Fox’s and Burton’s Biscuits, Fine Biscuits Company and Michel et Augustin. These sit outside the group headcount. A British reader working through a packet of Fox’s is therefore still eating in the extended family.
What the registers say
The top of the structure is Ferrero International S.A., a Luxembourg société anonyme based in Senningerberg. Ferrero describes it as the group’s holding company, and it was this company that approved the 2024/25 consolidated accounts. Ferrero does not disclose who holds its shares, or in what proportions.
The register in London is more forthcoming. Its record of persons with significant control for Ferrero U.K. Limited, the British company incorporated in 1966, shows one active entry: Mr Giovanni Ferrero, holding 75 per cent or more of the shares, with his identity verified on 18 December 2025. No other family member appears there as a controller.
The ceased entries on the same page are the more revealing part. One is the Luxembourg parent company itself. The other is an older entry for Giovanni in a lower band, recording voting rights of more than half but under three-quarters. It is the British arm alone, and the register says nothing about the ownership of the wider group. For one company, though, the answer is in writing, and it is a single name.
Who runs it now
Giovanni and his brother Pietro ran the company together until Pietro’s death in 2011; their father, Michele, died in 2015; and in 2017 Giovanni handed the chief executive’s job to Lapo Civiletti, keeping the chair and the strategy.
The day-to-day work belongs to Civiletti as chief executive and Daniel Martinez Carretero as chief financial officer. The arrangement is common in large family companies: the family keeps the chair and the long view, and professionals do the operational job. Ferrero simply has more of it to share out than most.
The profile that carries the estimate also notes that Giovanni is a novelist with eight published books. Most chairmen confine their fiction to the forecasts.
Buying America
Since 2015 Ferrero has mostly been buying America, making up for a late start: it first entered the US market in 1969. The run began in 2015 with Thorntons in Britain. In 2018 it bought Nestlé’s entire US confectionery business for $2.8bn.
The cereal deal was the big one. On 10 July 2025 Ferrero agreed to buy WK Kellogg Co, paying shareholders $23.00 a share in cash for an enterprise value of $3.1bn. Giovanni said in Ferrero’s own announcement that he was “thrilled to welcome WK Kellogg Co to the Ferrero Group”. The deal completed on 26 September 2025, and Kellogg became a wholly owned subsidiary. Civiletti called it, in the same announcement, a “trusted company with beloved brands”, which is how acquirers speak about a cereal company once they have agreed to buy it.
Taken together, the two American deals come to $5.9bn. One figure is a purchase price and the other an enterprise value, so the total is a rough measure, but it gives a fair sense of how much Ferrero has been willing to spend in America.
What comes next
The plain answer is that nobody outside the family knows. No succession plan has been published, and no heir has been named in any public filing. What follows is DDW’s own reading of the structure, not a reported plan.
Since 2017 the company has separated running the business from owning it, with a chief executive in charge of the first and the chairman’s family in charge of the second. That arrangement keeps working whether or not the next generation wants an office in Alba. A family that expects its children to run the company keeps the top job in the family. Ferrero handed it to Civiletti, which suggests the family’s future role is as owners rather than managers.
Set beside the Arnault succession, the Ferrero version is mostly silence. Of the two sons who once ran Michele’s company together, Giovanni is the one who remains. The register in London now records that son as the only person in control of the British arm.
For now, his is the only name.
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Cover: photograph Forbes, cut-out; illustration, DDW.
