Key Insights

• Institutions' substantial holdings in Bunzl implies that they have significant influence over the company's share price

• A total of 16 investors have a majority stake in the company with 50% ownership

• Insiders have sold recently

If you want to know who really controls Bunzl plc (LON:BNZL), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. The group holding the most number of shares in the company, around 89% to be precise, is institutions. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

No shareholder likes losing money on their investments, especially institutional investors who saw their holdings drop 3.1% in value last week. However, the 2.1% one-year returns may have helped alleviate their overall losses. They should, however, be mindful of further losses in the future.

In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of Bunzl.

View our latest analysis for Bunzl

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Bunzl?

Institutions typically measure themselves against a benchmark when reporting to their own investors, so they often become more enthusiastic about a stock once it's included in a major index. We would expect most companies to have some institutions on the register, especially if they are growing.

We can see that Bunzl does have institutional investors; and they hold a good portion of the company's stock. This suggests some credibility amongst professional investors. But we can't rely on that fact alone since institutions make bad investments sometimes, just like everyone does. It is not uncommon to see a big share price drop if two large institutional investors try to sell out of a stock at the same time. So it is worth checking the past earnings trajectory of Bunzl, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

Since institutional investors own more than half the issued stock, the board will likely have to pay attention to their preferences. We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in Bunzl. The company's largest shareholder is Mawer Investment Management Ltd., with ownership of 8.4%. In comparison, the second and third largest shareholders hold about 8.0% and 4.4% of the stock.

After doing some more digging, we found that the top 16 have the combined ownership of 50% in the company, suggesting that no single shareholder has significant control over the company.

Researching institutional ownership is a good way to gauge and filter a stock's expected performance. The same can be achieved by studying analyst sentiments. Quite a few analysts cover the stock, so you could look into forecast growth quite easily.