Why Ikwezi Mining Limited’s (ASX:IKW) Investor Composition Impacts Your Returns

Today, I will be analyzing Ikwezi Mining Limited’s (ASX:IKW) recent ownership structure, an important but not-so-popular subject among individual investors. A company’s ownership structure is often linked to its share performance in both the long- and short-term. Since the effect of an active institutional investor with a similar ownership as a passive pension-fund can be vastly different on a company’s corporate governance and accountability of shareholders, investors should take a closer look at IKW’s shareholder registry.

View our latest analysis for Ikwezi Mining

ASX:IKW Ownership_summary May 10th 18
ASX:IKW Ownership_summary May 10th 18

Institutional Ownership

Due to the big order sizes of institutional investors, a company’s shares can experience large, one-sided momentum, driven by high volume of shares removed from, or injected into, the market. With an institutional ownership of 6.30%, IKW doesn’t seem too exposed to higher volatility resulting from institutional trading.

Insider Ownership

I find insiders are another important group of stakeholders, who are directly involved in making key decisions related to the use of capital. In essence, insider ownership is more about the alignment of shareholders’ interests with the management. IKW insiders hold a significant stake of 48.46% in the company. This level of insider ownership has been found to have a negative impact on companies with consistently low PE ratios (underperformers), while it has been positive in the case of high PE ratio firms (outperformers). Another aspect of insider ownership is to learn about their recent transactions. While insider buying is possibly a sign of a positive outlook for the company, selling doesn’t necessarily indicate a negative outlook as they may be selling to meet personal financial needs.

General Public Ownership

With 2.79% ownership, the general public are a relatively smaller ownership class in IKW. This size of ownership, while considerably small for a public company, may not be enough to change company policy if the decision is not in sync with other large shareholders.

Private Company Ownership

Potential investors in IKW should also look at another important group of investors: private companies, with a stake of 42.45%, who are primarily invested because of strategic and capital gain interests. An ownership of this size indicates a strong financial backing and has the potential to influence IKW’s business strategy. Thus, investors should dig deeper into IKW’s business relations with these companies and how it can affect shareholder returns in the long-term.

Next Steps:

With a low level of institutional ownership, investors in IKW need not worry about non-fundamental factors such as ownership structure causing large impact on stock prices. However, ownership structure should not be the only determining factor when you’re building an investment thesis for IKW. Rather, you should be looking at fundamental drivers such as Ikwezi Mining’s past track record and financial health. I highly recommend you to complete your research by taking a look at the following:

  1. Financial Health: Is IKW’s operations financially sustainable? Balance sheets can be hard to analyze, which is why we’ve done it for you. Check out our financial health checks here.

  2. Past Track Record: Has IKW been consistently performing well irrespective of the ups and downs in the market? Go into more detail in the past performance analysis and take a look at the free visual representations of IKW’s historicals for more clarity.

  3. Other High-Performing Stocks: Are there other stocks that provide better prospects with proven track records? Explore our free list of these great stocks here.

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.
To help readers see pass the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price sensitive company announcements.

The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned.

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