Key Insights

• Institutions' substantial holdings in Befesa implies that they have significant influence over the company's share price

• The top 22 shareholders own 50% of the company

• Using data from analyst forecasts alongside ownership research, one can better assess the future performance of a company

If you want to know who really controls Befesa S.A. (ETR:BFSA), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. With 59% stake, institutions possess the maximum shares in the company. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

Because institutional owners have a huge pool of resources and liquidity, their investing decisions tend to carry a great deal 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 Befesa, beginning with the chart below.

View our latest analysis for Befesa

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Befesa?

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

Since institutional investors own more than half the issued stock, the board will likely have to pay attention to their preferences. We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in Befesa. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is Allianz Asset Management GmbH with 10.0% of shares outstanding. Meanwhile, the second and third largest shareholders, hold 5.4% and 5.1%, of the shares outstanding, respectively.

After doing some more digging, we found that the top 22 have the combined ownership of 50% in the company, suggesting that no single shareholder has significant control over the company.

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.