Amplifon: the widow IPO'd it, the daughter chaired it, shares returned 1,000%

Amplifon was born in 1950 in an under-stairs room at via Cerva 24 in Milan. Its founder, Algernon Charles Holland, was a British army major and special-forces veteran who had parachuted into northern Italy in 1944 to work with the resistance, stayed after the war as the Allies' telecommunications chief, married a Milanese woman, and set out to teach Italians to care for their hearing — the company's name fusing 'amplify' and 'phone'.

When Holland died in 2001, his widow Anna Maria oversaw the company's June 2001 listing on the Borsa Italiana. The arc accelerated after 2011, when their daughter Susan Carol Holland — a speech therapist — took the chairmanship from her mother and pushed international expansion: Europe, then the United States with the Miracle-Ear brand, then Australia.

In 2015 Susan hired Enrico Vita as chief executive, keeping ownership in the family through a holding vehicle with 44.9% of the shares while the professionals ran the roll-out. Demand from aging populations did the rest: Bloomberg calculated that by August 2018 the stock had returned almost 1,000% including reinvested dividends since the IPO, making Susan Holland a billionaire worth about $2.3 billion, with the UN projecting the over-60 population to double to 2.1 billion by mid-century.

The 2025 annual general meeting elected a nine-member board for 2025-2027 and added the third generation: Nina Cortese, 36, a biotechnologist and the second of Susan Holland's three children, granddaughter of the founder exactly 75 years after the founding. Susan Holland was reconfirmed chairwoman and Vita reconfirmed CEO, in continuity with their roles.

Shares returned almost 1,000% with dividends since the 2001 IPO; Susan Holland's 44.9% stake made her a $2.3bn billionaire, and revenues tripled under CEO Enrico Vita.

Ownership was separated from management: a 44.9% family holding bloc plus an outside CEO running operations meant continuity and ambition never competed for one chair.

Succession was staged across three generations — widow to listed company, daughter to the chair, granddaughter to a single board seat — instead of one disruptive leap.

The company rode a structural demand wave, an aging population, that rewarded patience: a 25-year family horizon suits a 6%-a-year growth market better than a quarterly one.

The founder's original mission, bringing hearing care to ordinary customers, gave the family a role beyond money and a reason to stay concentrated in the stock.

Family ownership and professional management are separable: keep the controlling stake, hire an outside CEO to triple revenues, then stage the third generation in one board seat at a time.

The 2025-2027 board term began with Susan Carol Holland as chairwoman, Enrico Vita reconfirmed as CEO after a decade in which revenues tripled, and Nina Cortese as the third-generation director. The company marked its 75th anniversary in 2025 as the world leader in hearing-aid retail, still controlled by the founder's descendants through their family holding.