The Fentener van Vlissingens are a family of Dutch entrepreneurs who came into wealth during the late 19th century as merchants and traders. Most famously, the family founded SHV in 1896, trading in coal, oil, gas and scrap metal throughout Europe. Frits Fentener van Vlissingen (1882-1962) built the initial success of the privately owned trading group – first in Rotterdam and then in Utrecht – leveraging the city’s position as the hub of the Dutch railway network. Now highly diversified, the company has made the family rich, worth a reported $12.7 billion. In the late 1960s, the seventh generation of the family founded self-service wholesale store Makro, which eventually expanded across Europe, the US, Africa, Latin America and Asia. In 1998, they sold the European arm of the business to German retail group Metro AG. Today, John Fentener van Vlissingen, the only surviving grandson of Frits, is at the head of the family and is the only brother of three to have found his fortune outside of the family business, establishing his own company BCD Holdings N.V., which has significant interests in the travel industry. According to his own website, in 2017, the four companies he operates generated sales worth $27.9 billion. The various heirs and heiresses of the van Vlissingen family continue to sit on the boards of a number of the companies under both SHV and BCD Holding Groups.
