Who Owns Indian Companies? A Decade of Shareholding Patterns of Automobile and IT Industry

It is not unusual for entity to derive its ownership and control structure from the culture and traditions of country of origin. It has become cliché that Indian companies are dominated by family ownership in the form of promoters due to the strong family cultural system of the country. Focusing on the Automobile and the IT industry, this paper takes particular look at the shareholding distribution over the last decade ending 2013. Sampling top 10 companies from the industries, a comparative trend, median and mean analysis was conducted within and between the industries. The research reveals that concentrated promoter's ownership is still strong both companies especially in the automobile industry with more than 50% promoters' shares. Promoters' ownership in the IT industry had steep fall from 57.1% in 2004 to 45.0% in 2013. It was known from the study that the automobile industry has more both institutional and individual investors than the IT industry, but the institutional investors' in increasing faster in the IT industry than the Automobile industry. It was concluded that, age of the firm as well as internationalisation of the company have impact on the shareholding patterns. Whiles old companies in the Automobile industry are family dominated ownership in the form of promoters, global companies in the IT industry are less concentrated with promoter's ownership