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A look at the shareholders of Ipsen S.A. (EPA:IPN) can tell us which group is most powerful. Generally speaking, as a company grows, institutions will increase their ownership. Conversely, insiders often decrease their ownership over time. Companies that used to be publicly owned tend to have lower insider ownership.
Ipsen is a pretty big company. It has a market capitalization of €9.4b. Normally institutions would own a significant portion of a company this size. In the chart below below, we can see that institutional investors have bought into the company. Let's delve deeper into each type of owner, to discover more about IPN.
View our latest analysis for Ipsen
What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Ipsen?
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.
Ipsen already has institutions on the share registry. Indeed, they own 19% of the company. This suggests some credibility amongst professional investors. But we can't rely on that fact alone, since institutions make bad investments sometimes, just like everyone does. 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 Ipsen'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 Ipsen. 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 Ipsen
While the precise definition of an insider can be subjective, almost everyone considers board members to be insiders. Company management run the business, but the CEO will answer to the board, even if he or she is a member of it.
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 suggests that insiders own under 1% of Ipsen S.A. in their own names. But they may have an indirect interest through a corporate structure that we haven't picked up on. As it is a large company, we'd only expect insiders to own a small percentage of it. But it's worth noting that they own €18m worth of shares. Arguably recent buying and selling is just as important to consider. You can click here to see if insiders have been buying or selling.