Yahoo Finance

Key Insights

• Significant control over E.ON by individual investors implies that the general public has more power to influence management and governance-related decisions

• 46% of the business is held by the top 25 shareholders

• Institutions own 36% of E.ON

A look at the shareholders of E.ON SE (ETR:EOAN) can tell us which group is most powerful. And the group that holds the biggest piece of the pie are individual investors with 48% ownership. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

Institutions, on the other hand, account for 36% of the company's stockholders. Insiders often own a large chunk of younger, smaller, companies while huge companies tend to have institutions as shareholders.

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

Check out our latest analysis for E.ON

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About E.ON?

Institutional investors commonly compare their own returns to the returns of a commonly followed index. So they generally do consider buying larger companies that are included in the relevant benchmark index.

As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in E.ON. This implies the analysts working for those institutions have looked at the stock and they like it. But just like anyone else, they could be wrong. When multiple institutions own a stock, there's always a risk that they are in a 'crowded trade'. When such a trade goes wrong, multiple parties may compete to sell stock fast. This risk is higher in a company without a history of growth. You can see E.ON's historic earnings and revenue below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story.

E.ON is not owned by hedge funds. RWE Aktiengesellschaft is currently the largest shareholder, with 15% of shares outstanding. The second and third largest shareholders are Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and BlackRock, Inc., with an equal amount of shares to their name at 5.1%.

On studying our ownership data, we found that 25 of the top shareholders collectively own less than 50% of the share register, implying that no single individual has a majority interest.

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.

Insider Ownership Of E.ON

The definition of an insider can differ slightly between different countries, but members of the board of directors always count. Company management run the business, but the CEO will answer to the board, even if he or she is a member of it.