Local retail investors bought an additional 14.16 million KCB shares in the nine months to September worth Sh273.3 million at the current price, deepening their stake in the tier-one lender.
Latest regulatory filings by the bank show that as of September 30, 2023, local individual shareholders held 861.58 million shares equivalent to a stake of 26.81 percent in the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) listed lender, up from 847.43 million shares or 26.37 percent at the start of the year.
The filings indicate that the additional shares were acquired from local institutional investors and foreign investors, whose holdings fell by 7.81 million and 6.35 million units, respectively to 1.439 billion and 278.4 million shares in the period.
Local institutions accounted for a stake of 44.77 percent in KCB by the end of September, down from 45.01 percent at the beginning of the year, while that of foreigners dropped from 8.86 percent to 8.66 percent.
The stakes held by the Treasury and National Social Security Fund remained unchanged over the period, at 19.76 percent and 9.73 percent respectively, as per the KCB filings.
KCB’s share price retreated by 45.3 percent in the nine months to September, partly due to foreign investor selling, which opened the door for local investors looking to buy into the bank at a discount to make their entry.
The bank’s stock is trading at Sh19.30 per share at the NSE, having opened the year at Sh38.10 a unit.
The sales by the foreigners coincided with a period of general foreign exits from the local bourse as part of a wider flight of capital to Western markets, particularly the US, due to global economic uncertainty.
By the end of September, KCB had 6,667 local institutional and 682 foreign investors on its books, while the number of local retail investors stood at 187,177.
The lender has 3.21 billion issued shares, hence its stock’s ability to support a large number of foreign and institutional investors who make large ticket trades and eye firms with solid fundamentals.
The KCB stock is exposed to international investors courtesy of its listing on the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) Frontier Markets Small Cap Index.
It was until mid-2021 listed on the larger cap MSCI Frontier Market Index, which currently contains three Kenyan firms namely Safaricom, Equity Group and EABL.
