Merck is the oldest pharmaceutical and chemical company in the world, and the reason a family in its thirteenth generation still runs it is a legal form most English-language coverage skips over in a clause.
Merck KGaA is a Kommanditgesellschaft auf Aktien — a partnership limited by shares. It has a general partner, E. Merck KG, which holds 70.274% of the total capital, and outside shareholders who hold the remaining 29.726% in listed stock. The Merck family holds substantially all of E. Merck KG.
The percentage is not the interesting part. A 70% holder of an ordinary German stock corporation would also control it. What matters is that the general partner's authority does not come from the 70%. It comes from the office.
The thing an ownership percentage cannot tell you
In a KGaA, the general partner is not elected. There is no annual vote in which shareholders confirm it, no slate, and no campaign that could replace it. Shareholders elect a supervisory board and vote on the matters reserved to a general meeting, but the general partner sits outside that process entirely.
Run the counterfactual that makes the difference visible. If E. Merck KG sold down to 40% of the capital, an ordinary majority shareholder would have lost control. The general partner would not have, because none of its authority was ever contingent on holding a majority.
That is why this profile publishes an economic percentage and no voting percentage. There is no vote to count. Inventing a "voting power" figure to fill the field would produce a number that looks comparable to Meta's and describes something entirely different.
What the general partner can and cannot do
Both decision rights below are marked as needing another party's agreement, and that marking is doing something slightly awkward that a reader should know about.
Fundamental decisions at Merck KGaA require both a general-meeting resolution and the general partner's consent. So E. Merck KG cannot amend the charter or approve a merger by itself — it needs the shareholders. But the shareholders cannot do those things without E. Merck KG either.
The honest description is that the general partner holds a veto rather than a mandate. It can stop almost anything and start comparatively little. Our decision-rights table currently records only whether the controller can act alone, which captures the first half of that and not the second.
What is not established here
The internal governance of E. Merck KG — how the family's votes are organised within the partnership, what majorities the Board of Partners needs, and how successors are admitted — is not covered by the sources cited. That is the layer where control actually changes hands over generations, and it is not disclosed in the listed company's annual report.