Billionaire John Kibunga Kimani raised his stake in telco giant Safaricom by 8.64 million shares to 27.7 million units in the six months to December 2023, joining investors who have taken advantage of the stock’s lower price to add to their holdings.
The additional shares are valued at Sh113.12 million, going by the company’s closing price of Sh13.10 a share on Friday.
The company’s shareholder register for December shows Dr Kimani’s additional stake cemented his position as the telco’s second-largest East African individual shareholder. His stake is only surpassed by the 40.41 million units held jointly by Chirag Menesh Solanki and Kalavati Menesh Solanki, who cut their holding by 131,000 units between June and December 2023.
Dr Kimani’s stake in the company is now valued at Sh362.4 million at the current price, while the Solanki stake is worth Sh529.3 million, which is the equivalent of 0.1 percent of the telco’s total valuation of Sh524.9 billion.
Retail investors holding up to 100,000 shares each, who had progressively cut their stake in Safaricom between the firm’s 2008 initial public offering and 2019 on profit taking, have been rebuilding their position over the last two years as the company’s share price trends downwards from highs of Sh40 and above.
Safaricom’s share price fell by 20.6 percent to Sh13.90 between June and last December, and with foreign corporate investors reducing their exposure to the stock, local investors stepped in to add to their stake in the telco.
The regulatory filings show that the volume of shares held by East African individual shareholders rose to 1.715 billion by the end of December from 1.653 billion in June 2023.
Local corporate investors —whose classification includes anchor owners Vodafone Kenya Ltd and the National Treasury— saw their stake rise from 34.88 billion shares to 35.22 billion. Foreign individual investors also joined in the buying, raising their holding to 53.16 million units from 45.66 million in June 2023.
On the other hand, foreign institutional investors cut their stake to 3.08 billion units from 3.49 billion units in June.
Safaricom is the largest listed firm on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) by market capitalisation, number of investors and issued shares, making it accessible to both retail and institutional investors across a wide range of ownership bands.
The company’s IPO in 2008 saw 896,213 new brokerage accounts opened as retail investors lined up to take a slice of the telco.
This more than doubled the number of accounts at the NSE to 1.7 million, with small investors applying for 22.6 billion units of the telco’s shares or 464 percent of what was allocated for them.
Over the long term, the numbers of those holding 100,000 shares and below have dropped significantly, from 822,122 in March 2009 —a year after the telco’s IPO— to 533,172 in December 2023.
