Foreign investors purchased an additional 56.5 million KCB shares currently valued at Sh1.92 billion in three months ended June 2024 amid the appreciation of the stock’s valuation at the Nairobi bourse.
KCB Group's latest filings show foreign investors closed June this year with 348.85 million shares from 292.35 million at the end of March of the same year to take their stake above 10 percent for the first time in 24 months.
The latest purchases marked the third consecutive quarter of large purchases of the banking stock whose share price at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) in the three months under review rallied to highs of Sh37.95 on May 28 before closing June at Sh31.25.
KCB’s Monday opening price was Sh34.15. The purchase by the foreigners came in the period when local individual and institutional investors relinquished over 57 million KCB shares on the NSE.
The buying also coincided with the quarter in which Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), an international firm that provides investment data and analytics services to investors, promoted KCB Group to its MSCI frontier markets index effective May 1, increasing the stock’s visibility to global investors.
KCB was promoted from the small-cap index, joining Safaricom, Equity Group, and East African Breweries in the constituents of the frontier markets index that captures large and mid-cap stocks across 28 frontier markets.
The increased buying took foreign investors’ stake in KCB to 10.86 percent at the end of June from 9.1 percent in March. This is their highest stake in KCB since September 2021 when it was at 11.61 percent before dropping to 10.35 percent in June 2022 and eventually going below 10 percent.
The latest purchase by the foreign investors adds to the 6.18 million shares that they had purchased between January and March this year and the 7.81 million bought between September and December last year.
Foreigners are reversing the general trend of selling that had seen their stake in KCB fall to the low of 8.66 percent in September last year compared with highs of 29.25 percent as at the end of December 2017.
Their accumulation in the three months to June 2024 also came alongside that of the National Social Security Fund(NSSF) whose stake in KCB hit a new high of 10.01 percent after purchasing an additional 5.48 million shares in the review period.
The NSSF’s additional shares are currently valued at Sh187.2 million.
NSSF is one of the anchor shareholders of KCB alongside the National Treasury, which maintains a 19.76 percent stake in the lender, equivalent to 635 million shares.
The review period saw local institutional shareholders cut their stake to over two-year low of 42.51 percent from 43.26 percent while that of local individual shareholders reduced to 26.12 percent from 26.64 percent.
KCB share’s year-to-date return is at 55.94 percent, only dwarfed by Bamburi Cement (71.55 percent) and Liberty Kenya (58.81 percent).
