In This Article:
Key Insights
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Significant control over SEEK 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 41% ownership
If you want to know who really controls SEEK Limited (ASX:SEK), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. We can see that individual investors own the lion's share in the company with 56% ownership. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).
Following a 3.7% increase in the stock price last week, individual investors profited the most, but institutions who own 40% stock also stood to gain from the increase.
Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholders can tell us about SEEK.
View our latest analysis for SEEK
What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About SEEK?
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.
SEEK already has institutions on the share registry. Indeed, they own a respectable stake in the company. 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 SEEK's earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.
We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in SEEK. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is BlackRock, Inc. with 6.0% of shares outstanding. Fidelity International Ltd is the second largest shareholder owning 5.9% of common stock, and State Street Global Advisors, Inc. holds about 5.6% of the company stock.
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.
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 SEEK
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.