Individual investors who have a significant stake must be disappointed along with institutions after AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik Aktiengesellschaft's (VIE:ATS) market cap dropped by €65m

Key Insights

• Significant control over AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik by individual investors implies that the general public has more power to influence management and governance-related decisions
• 50% of the business is held by the top 10 shareholders
• Institutions own 33% of AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik

Every investor in AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik Aktiengesellschaft (VIE:ATS) should be aware of the most powerful shareholder groups. With 49% stake, individual investors 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.

While the holdings of individual investors took a hit after last week’s 7.9% price drop, institutions with their 33% holdings also suffered.

Let's delve deeper into each type of owner of AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik, beginning with the chart below.

Check out our latest analysis for AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik?

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 AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik 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 AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik's earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.

We note that hedge funds don't have a meaningful investment in AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is Johannes Dörflinger-Stiftung, Endowment Arm with 18% of shares outstanding. For context, the second largest shareholder holds about 18% of the shares outstanding, followed by an ownership of 4.0% by the third-largest shareholder.

On further inspection, we found that more than half the company's shares are owned by the top 10 shareholders, suggesting that the interests of the larger shareholders are balanced out to an extent by the smaller ones.

While studying institutional ownership for a company can add value to your research, it is also a good practice to research analyst recommendations to get a deeper understand of a stock's expected performance. 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 AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik

The definition of company insiders can be subjective and does vary between jurisdictions. Our data reflects individual insiders, capturing board members at the very least. 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.

Insider ownership is positive when it signals leadership are thinking like the true owners of the company. However, high insider ownership can also give immense power to a small group within the company. This can be negative in some circumstances.

Our data cannot confirm that board members are holding shares personally. Given we are not picking up on insider ownership, we may have missing data. Therefore, it would be interesting to assess the CEO compensation and tenure, here.

General Public Ownership

The general public-- including retail investors -- own 49% stake in the company, and hence can't easily be ignored. This size of ownership, while considerable, may not be enough to change company policy if the decision is not in sync with other large shareholders.

Private Company Ownership

We can see that Private Companies own 18%, of the shares on issue. It's hard to draw any conclusions from this fact alone, so its worth looking into who owns those private companies. Sometimes insiders or other related parties have an interest in shares in a public company through a separate private company.

Next Steps:

I find it very interesting to look at who exactly owns a company. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. To that end, you should be aware of the 2 warning signs we've spotted with AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik .

Ultimately the future is most important. You can access this free report on analyst forecasts for the company.

NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the last twelve months, which refer to the 12-month period ending on the last date of the month the financial statement is dated. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures.

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This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.