In This Article:
Key Insights
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Significantly high institutional ownership implies Kimberly-Clark's stock price is sensitive to their trading actions
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The top 25 shareholders own 49% of the company
If you want to know who really controls Kimberly-Clark Corporation (NYSE:KMB), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. With 79% stake, institutions possess the maximum shares in the company. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).
Given the vast amount of money and research capacities at their disposal, institutional ownership tends to carry a lot of weight, especially with individual investors. As a result, a sizeable amount of institutional money invested in a firm is generally viewed as a positive attribute.
Let's delve deeper into each type of owner of Kimberly-Clark, beginning with the chart below.
View our latest analysis for Kimberly-Clark
What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Kimberly-Clark?
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.
We can see that Kimberly-Clark 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. 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 Kimberly-Clark's historic earnings and revenue below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story.
Since institutional investors own more than half the issued stock, the board will likely have to pay attention to their preferences. Hedge funds don't have many shares in Kimberly-Clark. BlackRock, Inc. is currently the company's largest shareholder with 9.9% of shares outstanding. Meanwhile, the second and third largest shareholders, hold 9.2% and 5.8%, of the shares outstanding, respectively.
Our studies suggest that the top 25 shareholders collectively control less than half of the company's shares, meaning that the company's shares are widely disseminated and there is no dominant shareholder.
While it makes sense to study institutional ownership data for a company, it also makes sense to study analyst sentiments to know which way the wind is blowing. Quite a few analysts cover the stock, so you could look into forecast growth quite easily.