Key Insights

• Significantly high institutional ownership implies JOYY's stock price is sensitive to their trading actions

• 52% of the business is held by the top 5 shareholders

• Insiders own 41% of JOYY

To get a sense of who is truly in control of JOYY Inc. (NASDAQ:YY), it is important to understand the ownership structure of the business. And the group that holds the biggest piece of the pie are institutions with 43% ownership. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

Since institutional have access to huge amounts of capital, their market moves tend to receive a lot of scrutiny by retail or individual investors. Hence, having a considerable amount of institutional money invested in a company is often regarded as a desirable trait.

Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholders can tell us about JOYY.

View our latest analysis for JOYY

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About JOYY?

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.

JOYY 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 JOYY's earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.

It looks like hedge funds own 6.0% of JOYY shares. That catches my attention because hedge funds sometimes try to influence management, or bring about changes that will create near term value for shareholders. The company's CEO Xueling Li is the largest shareholder with 30% of shares outstanding. In comparison, the second and third largest shareholders hold about 10% and 6.0% of the stock.

To make our study more interesting, we found that the top 5 shareholders control more than half of the company which implies that this group has considerable sway over the company's decision-making.

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. There are a reasonable number of analysts covering the stock, so it might be useful to find out their aggregate view on the future.