Ownership Structure in CEE Companies and its Influence on Stock Performance

Ownership structure tends to be crucial in company’s strategic management. Ownership structure plays a major role in corporate governance defining enterprise development trends. It gains importance when the company operates in rapidly changing market environment or if the company itself undergoes restructuring process, which is the case of the companies located in Central and Eastern European region. CEE companies went through the two waves of major change in their ownership structure: first occurred during the privatization in mid 90-s, when corporate ownership changed from the State to private individuals; and second was observed relatively recently, when Western European companies, which needed to diversify their regional market portfolios for further growth, offered attractive premiums for the strategic targets operating in developing Central and Eastern European markets. As a result in CEE countries there are very different patterns of corporate ownership structure regarding the percentage of the company owned as well as the type of shareholder. The aim of the present research is to discover the most common ownership patterns of CEE companies, find out which type of ownership structure most favourably influences corporate stock performance, which can add value to the investment decisions made by investors. To achieve the main research target authors conducted a study, the corpus of which consisted of fundamental and trading data on 140 largest companies listed in 11 CEE countries: Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania). The period examined in the course of the study spanned from April 2000 to November 2009. The data used in the research was originated from corporate annual reports, corporate web-sites and from local stock exchanges. In the course of research all companies were classified in 5 groups according to their shareholder structure: financial, strategic, government, family/founder, other. Then, the performance of each group was analyzed as well as the fundamental strength based on most common fundamental ratios: ROE, ROIC, Operating margin, Equity ratio. Research findings refute the common accepted theory usually applied to Western European companies that the best performance is achieved by the companies, which have family as a major shareholder. In CEE countries the best performers are companies with strong governmental shareholding which beat the market. Moreover, companies with government being major shareholder can be considered as safe harbour during market downturns. Fundamentally stronger turned out to be companies with strategic holding (highest capital and earnings profitability) as well as governmental holding (most solid balance sheets). It comes across striking that fundamentally weakest are the companies with financial holding. So, the investors of these companies seem not to receive what they opted these companies for. Research findings allowed authors to outline characteristics of the CEE investment universe according to corporate ownership structure. 36% of the analyzed companies have strategic investor as major shareholder, government and financial investors tend to be major holders of 20% of companies each and a bit below than 20% of analyzed companies have one major investor, usually a founder, Chairman or CEO. Industry wise the split of companies by ownership type is as follows: utility and energy sector is dominated by companies with government being a major investor; energy, communications and financial sectors – strategic investor; consumer non-cyclical – financial investors; basic materials sector - family/founder/CEO. Keywords: Central and Eastern Europe, ownership structure, major shareholder, share performance, corporate governanc