How Ownership Concentration Has Increased

Ric Marshall, Jonathan Ponder and Ahasan Amin

July 11, 2022

Our most recent analysis highlights a global trend toward increased concentration in company ownership.¹ Controlled companies accounted for nearly 35% of the MSCI ACWI Index by market capitalization (nearly 46% of constituent companies) as of 2022, a considerable increase from the 26% by market cap (32% of companies) observed in 2015.² Despite this general trend, we continued to find a wide range of ownership regimes across markets and Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS®) sectors.³ The interactive chart below, based on our new report, provides further details on the evolution of company ownership from 2015 to 2022.

How to interact with this plot: Filter ownership data by clicking on a particular sector icon, period and/or drop-down option, and hover over the bars to learn more about ownership trends. Use the clickable legend to select multiple ownership types (use shift-click to restore multiple owner types).

¹Under our MSCI ESG Ratings methodology, there are three largest-owner classifications used as the basis for this analysis: (i) controlling, whereby the largest shareholder (or group) holds 30% or more of the voting rights; (ii) principal, where the largest shareholder holds between 10% and 30%; and (iii) widely held, where no shareholder holds more than 10%. Please refer to the Ownership and Control 2022 report or the MSCI ESG Ratings Methodology for further details.

²This is based on data for all MSCI ACWI Index constituents as of May 15, 2015, and Feb. 1, 2022, respectively.

³GICS® is the global industry classification standard jointly developed by MSCI and S&P Global Market Intelligence.