Succession proves a tricky art in business

The trip was organized by the China-Britain Business Council and the Relay China Youth Elite Association, a non-governmental organization that gives young entrepreneurs and successors in private business a platform to exchange business ideas, improve themselves and network.

Chen Hao, founder of the Relay China Youth Elite Association, says: "The young generation of Chinese entrepreneurs has an extensive international education and broad horizons and easily adapts to new ideas, so learning management experience from their foreign counterparts is highly useful."

At Berry Bros & Rudd, Britain's oldest wine and spirit merchant, the Chinese businessmen learned that the family firm has traded from the same shop for more than 315 years. They also learned that Berrys first supplied wine to the British royal family during King George III's reign and has continued to do so until now.

"It is particularly interesting that Berry Bros & Rudd successfully switched from supplying fashionable coffee to wines and spirits," says Han Nianshi, chairman of Suzhou Parsun Power Machine Co Ltd, an outboard engine manufacturer in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, that exports to Asia and Africa.

Han, 27, studied in Canada and took the reins of the company when he was 22. Last year Forbes China ranked him as the second youngest on its list of China's richest men under 30.

"The management of this company certainly knows how to run a business and develop it in step with the times," he says. "It's very professional."

At Fleming Family & Partners, Matthew Fleming, the fifth-generation of the Fleming family, told the Chinese businessmen the story of his family. Matthew Fleming is now a director of FF&P Private Equity, FF&P Wealth Planning and works across the group developing business and relationships.

Ling says the tenacity of the Flemings and their ability to reinvent the business is impressive. In 1873, Robert Fleming, a Dundee merchant, started a bank after spotting an opportunity to invest in the nascent railways of the United States. In the 1970s the family, advised by a veteran financier, decided to sell the bank to Chase Manhattan for 4.9 billion pounds ($7.7 billion), at what proved to be the top of the market.

It was a controversial decision, Ling says, but "the Fleming family's most important requirements for every generation are the strong interest and sense of family business, sense of historical mission, sense of honor of the family".

"They have formed a well-developed family inheritance mechanism," Ling says.

British family firms have perfected methods for selecting successors and succession teams and benefit from modern business management, he says, all of these promoting continuation of family businesses and the development and innovation of technology.

When it comes to Chinese young rich second-generation entrepreneurs, Ling says: "We should remember that honor and responsibility are very important."

"Honor is created and built up by our fathers' generation of entrepreneurs by overcoming difficulties. Responsibility will help us carry forward the spirit of entrepreneurship and further develop business."

Opportunities can sometimes open by switching from one industry to another, even if pitfalls lie in store, he says. "In a well-developed market, such as Britain, we saw that family businesses are enduring entities that score great successes."

Pedro Nueno, president of the China Europe International Business School, told a forum in June: "The current primary goals for these second-generation family enterprises are business transformation and upgrades, sustainability, accumulation, preservation and the inheritance of family wealth."

The Hurun Wealth Report 2013 says the number of Chinese millionaires - those with a personal wealth of 10 million yuan ($1.63 million) or more - has increased to 1.05 million this year, 30,000 more than a year earlier.

The number of the super-rich, those with personal assets worth more than 100 million yuan, has risen by 1,000 to 64,500.