What Kind Of Investors Own Most Of ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance Co., Ltd. (HKG:6060)?

The big shareholder groups in ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance Co., Ltd. (HKG:6060) have power over the company. Institutions will often hold stock in bigger companies, and we expect to see insiders owning a noticeable percentage of the smaller ones. We also tend to see lower insider ownership in companies that were previously publicly owned.

ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance has a market capitalization of HK$56b, so it's too big to fly under the radar. We'd expect to see both institutions and retail investors owning a portion of the company. In the chart below, we can see that institutions own shares in the company. We can zoom in on the different ownership groups, to learn more about ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance.

View our latest analysis for ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance?

Many institutions measure their performance against an index that approximates the local market. So they usually pay more attention to companies that are included in major indices.

As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance. 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 ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance's historic earnings and revenue below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story.

Hedge funds don't have many shares in ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance. The company's largest shareholder is Ant Small And Micro Financial Services Group Co., Ltd, Asset Management Arm, with ownership of 14%. The second and third largest shareholders are Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Limited, with an equal amount of shares to their name at 10%.

On further inspection, we found that more than half the company's shares are owned by the top 6 shareholders, suggesting that the interests of the larger shareholders are balanced out to an extent by the smaller ones.

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. Quite a few analysts cover the stock, so you could look into forecast growth quite easily.

Insider Ownership Of ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance

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.

Most consider insider ownership a positive because it can indicate the board is well aligned with other shareholders. However, on some occasions too much power is concentrated within this group.

Our data cannot confirm that board members are holding shares personally. We do not see this low level of ownership often, and it is possible our data is imperfect. But shareholders can click here to check if insiders have been selling stock.

General Public Ownership

The general public holds a 34% stake in ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance. 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

Our data indicates that Private Companies hold 19%, of the company's shares. 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.

Public Company Ownership

We can see that public companies hold 26% of the ZhongAn Online P & C Insurance shares on issue. It's hard to say for sure but this suggests they have entwined business interests. This might be a strategic stake, so it's worth watching this space for changes in ownership.

Next Steps:

While it is well worth considering the different groups that own a company, there are other factors that are even more important.

I like to dive deeper into how a company has performed in the past. You can access this interactive graph of past earnings, revenue and cash flow, for free.

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. 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.
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