While institutions own 42% of Bayer Aktiengesellschaft (ETR:BAYN), individual investors are its largest shareholders with 58% ownership (2024)

Every investor in Bayer Aktiengesellschaft (ETR:BAYN) should be aware of the most powerful shareholder groups. With 58% 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.

Meanwhile, institutions make up 42% of the company’s shareholders. Insiders often own a large chunk of younger, smaller, companies while huge companies tend to have institutions as shareholders.

Let's delve deeper into each type of owner of Bayer, beginning with the chart below.

See our latest analysis for Bayer

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Bayer?

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.

As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in Bayer. 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 Bayer, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

Bayer is not owned by hedge funds. Looking at our data, we can see that the largest shareholder is BlackRock, Inc. with 4.9% of shares outstanding. With 3.8% and 3.0% of the shares outstanding respectively, The Vanguard Group, Inc. and Massachusetts Financial Services Company are the second and third largest shareholders.

A deeper look at our ownership data shows that the top 25 shareholders collectively hold less than half of the register, suggesting a large group of small holders where no single shareholder has a majority.

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

Insider Ownership Of Bayer

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. Management ultimately answers to the board. However, it is not uncommon for managers to be executive board members, especially if they are a founder or the CEO.

I generally consider insider ownership to be a good thing. However, on some occasions it makes it more difficult for other shareholders to hold the board accountable for decisions.

Our data cannot confirm that board members are holding shares personally. It is unusual not to have at least some personal holdings by board members, so our data might be flawed. A good next step would be to check how much the CEO is paid.

General Public Ownership

The general public, who are usually individual investors, hold a substantial 58% stake in Bayer, suggesting it is a fairly popular stock. This size of ownership gives investors from the general public some collective power. They can and probably do influence decisions on executive compensation, dividend policies and proposed business acquisitions.

Next Steps:

While it is well worth considering the different groups that own a company, there are other factors that are even more important. For instance, we've identified 3 warning signs for Bayer (1 makes us a bit uncomfortable) that you should be aware of.

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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