In This Article:
Key Insights
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Significant control over BCE by individual investors implies that the general public has more power to influence management and governance-related decisions
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A total of 25 investors have a majority stake in the company with 30% ownership
Every investor in BCE Inc. (TSE:BCE) should be aware of the most powerful shareholder groups. The group holding the most number of shares in the company, around 59% to be precise, is individual investors. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).
While individual investors were the group that benefitted the most from last week’s CA$1.6b market cap gain, institutions too had a 41% share in those profits.
In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of BCE.
Check out our latest analysis for BCE
What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About BCE?
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 BCE does have institutional investors; and they hold a good portion of the company's stock. 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. If multiple institutions change their view on a stock at the same time, you could see the share price drop fast. It's therefore worth looking at BCE's earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.
BCE is not owned by hedge funds. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is BMO Asset Management Corp. with 3.7% of shares outstanding. For context, the second largest shareholder holds about 2.6% of the shares outstanding, followed by an ownership of 2.3% by the third-largest shareholder.
A deeper look at our ownership data shows that the top 25 shareholders collectively hold less than half of the register, suggesting a large group of small holders where no single shareholder has a majority.
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. There are a reasonable number of analysts covering the stock, so it might be useful to find out their aggregate view on the future.
Insider Ownership Of BCE
While the precise definition of an insider can be subjective, almost everyone considers board members to be insiders. Company management run the business, but the CEO will answer to the board, even if he or she is a member of it.