North Holdings Group has been based in the City of London since 1998. We are privately owned, deliberately small at the centre, and accountable to a long list of people who stay.
The group began as a single engineering business on the edge of Sheffield, bought by three partners who had spent their careers in it and did not want to see it broken up. They set out a simple rule that still governs the group: own businesses you understand, and give them time.
Today North Holdings Group comprises fourteen operating companies in nine countries, organised into three divisions. Each company retains its own name, its own management team and its own operating board. The centre exists to allocate capital, set governance standards and stay out of the way.
We are wholly owned by the founding families and a small group of long-standing individual shareholders. There are no outside institutional investors, no fund life and no scheduled exit. That structure is the product: it lets our companies make decisions measured in years rather than quarters.
Our head office employs twenty-eight people. The rest of the group — some 2,400 colleagues — works in the businesses themselves.
We have grown slowly and on purpose. Most of what follows took years to arrange and, in two cases, more than a decade to get right.
North Holdings Group is incorporated in London. The group's first business, a Sheffield precision-engineering works, is acquired from its retiring founder.
North Industrial is formed to bring three manufacturing companies under a single operating board, with shared procurement and apprenticeship programmes.
Meridian Commodities joins the group, giving the industrial businesses a direct route to metals sourcing and hedging.
North Technology is established after the acquisition of a Leeds-based maintenance-software company serving utilities.
The group consolidates its regulatory, compliance and company-secretarial team in London, creating a shared function supporting every operating business.
The group publishes its fourth annual stewardship review, covering all fourteen operating businesses.
Our operating board meets monthly. Managing directors of the three divisions sit on it alongside the group executive, and each is accountable for their own company's results.
Chair
Joined the board in 2014 and became Chair in 2019. A chartered accountant by training, she spent eighteen years in industrial turnarounds before moving into non-executive work. She chairs the group's audit and nomination committees.
Chief Executive
Appointed Chief Executive in 2021 after eight years running North Industrial. He is responsible for capital allocation across the divisions and for the group's operating review cycle.
Chief Financial Officer
Joined in 2018 from a listed logistics group. She oversees group finance, treasury and the annual stewardship review, and sits on the boards of six operating companies.
Managing Director, Meridian Commodities
Has led the commodities desk since 2015, having previously built its European metals book. He is based in London and spends roughly a third of the year with the Rotterdam and Singapore teams.
Managing Director, North Technology
Joined in 2023 to consolidate the division's software businesses onto a common platform strategy. She previously led product at a European vertical-software provider.
Group General Counsel
Responsible for legal, compliance and company secretarial matters across the group. She joined in 2016 and advises the board on governance and transaction structure.
These are not slogans. Each is tied to a reporting line in our annual stewardship review.
We inherit businesses that other people built. Our job is to hand them on in better condition than we found them — financially, operationally and environmentally.
We report the same numbers internally and externally, including the years that go badly. Our stewardship review has never omitted a portfolio company.
Capital is committed without a deadline. When a business needs two years to fix something, it gets two years, provided the plan is honest and the people are right.
Our companies are rooted in the places they operate. Apprenticeships, supplier relationships and community commitments stay with the business, not the centre.
North Holdings Group is a private limited company registered in England and Wales. The board comprises three executive directors, two independent non-executive directors and the Chair. It meets six times a year; the audit committee meets quarterly.
Each operating company has its own board with a majority of group-appointed directors and at least one independent member. Capital requests above £2 million come to the group board; below that, divisions decide.