Key Insights

• The considerable ownership by retail investors in Niu Technologies indicates that they collectively have a greater say in management and business strategy

• The top 9 shareholders own 50% of the company

• Insiders own 37% of Niu Technologies

If you want to know who really controls Niu Technologies (NASDAQ:NIU), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. With 44% stake, retail investors possess the maximum shares in the company. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

Meanwhile, individual insiders make up 37% of the company’s shareholders. Institutions often own shares in more established companies, while it's not unusual to see insiders own a fair bit of smaller companies.

Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholders can tell us about Niu Technologies.

See our latest analysis for Niu Technologies

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Niu Technologies?

Institutions typically measure themselves against a benchmark when reporting to their own investors, so they often become more enthusiastic about a stock once it's included in a major index. We would expect most companies to have some institutions on the register, especially if they are growing.

We can see that Niu Technologies does have institutional investors; and they hold a good portion of the company's stock. This suggests some credibility amongst professional investors. But we can't rely on that fact alone since institutions make bad investments sometimes, just like everyone does. It is not uncommon to see a big share price drop if two large institutional investors try to sell out of a stock at the same time. So it is worth checking the past earnings trajectory of Niu Technologies, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

Hedge funds don't have many shares in Niu Technologies. Yinan Li is currently the company's largest shareholder with 32% of shares outstanding. With 6.4% and 4.8% of the shares outstanding respectively, Niu Holding Inc. and Yan Li are the second and third largest shareholders. Yan Li, who is the third-largest shareholder, also happens to hold the title of Chairman of the Board.

On further inspection, we found that more than half the company's shares are owned by the top 9 shareholders, suggesting that the interests of the larger shareholders are balanced out to an extent by the smaller ones.

While studying institutional ownership for a company can add value to your research, it is also a good practice to research analyst recommendations to get a deeper understand of a stock's expected performance. There are plenty of analysts covering the stock, so it might be worth seeing what they are forecasting, too.