Every investor in SUSE S.A. (ETR:SUSE) should be aware of the most powerful shareholder groups. We can see that private equity firms own the lion's share in the company with 77% ownership. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

Meanwhile, individual investors make up 12% of the company’s shareholders.

Let's delve deeper into each type of owner of SUSE, beginning with the chart below.

View our latest analysis for SUSE

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About SUSE?

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 SUSE. 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. 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 SUSE, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

SUSE is not owned by hedge funds. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is EQT Partners AB with 77% of shares outstanding. This essentially means that they have extensive influence, if not outright control, over the future of the corporation. In comparison, the second and third largest shareholders hold about 2.9% and 2.2% of the stock.

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 SUSE

While the precise definition of an insider can be subjective, almost everyone considers board members to be insiders. The company management answer to the board and the latter should represent the interests of shareholders. Notably, sometimes top-level managers are on the board themselves.

Insider ownership is positive when it signals leadership are thinking like the true owners of the company. However, high insider ownership can also give immense power to a small group within the company. This can be negative in some circumstances.

We note our data does not show any board members holding shares, personally. It is unusual not to have at least some personal holdings by board members, so our data might be flawed. A good next step would be to check how much the CEO is paid.