Companies
KCB Group now corrects NSSF shareholding
Tuesday May 09 2023
Kenya Commercial Bank Kipande branch in Nairobi. FILE PHOTO | DENNIS ONSONGO | NMG
KCB Group has corrected its shareholding structure and dropped the previous filings that had shown that the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) sold Sh837.2 million worth of shares in three months to December.
The lender has made the corrections on its regulatory filings for December to show that NSSF bought an additional 21.36 million shares in the three months to December to take its stake to the high of 9.73 percent.
This remained unchanged as at the end of March.
The latest disclosure is a correction from the previous filing that had been made available in February showing that NSFF had disposed of 21.63 million shares in the three-month period and cut its stake in the lender to 8.39 percent.
The revision means that NSSF, between October and December last year spent about Sh809.6 million accumulated KCB shares in the period the bank’s share price averaged Sh37.90.
The NSSF has been steadily increasing its stake in the lender and other large blue chips at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), eyeing its stable fundamentals and regular dividend payments that complement investment income from government securities.
The pension fund is the biggest local institutional investor in the stock market, holding significant stakes in multiple firms directly and through its appointed fund managers.
Its latest stake lines it up for a Sh312.7 million from KCB as a final dividend, added to about Sh269.9 million pocketed in January as an interim dividend.
KCB mid-January paid Sh1 as interim dividend per share and has proposed a similar amount as a final dividend to shareholders that were on its register at the close of business on April 6.
The lender, alongside Safaricom, provides the pension fund with its biggest source of dividend income, owing to the large volume of shares held in the two companies.
The fund’s latest audited financials covering the year to June 2021 show that KCB and Safaricom earned it dividends of Sh265.7 million and Sh337.7 million in the period respectively.
The NSSF held a 6.12 percent ownership in the KCB in March 2019 and has been raising it from the purchase of more shares.
besides the transfer of its previous stake in the National Bank of Kenya (NBK) into shares of the country’s second-largest lender.
NSSF’s rise in stake came in the period foreign investors sold 9.03 million shares between October 2022 and March, to cut their shareholding to 8.9 percent.
The stake of local institutional investors was 45.04 percent while that of local individuals closed March at 26.3 percent. The Treasury’s stake remained unchanged at 19.76 percent.
