Foreign investors shed 23.6 million KCB Group shares valued at Sh2.1 billion at the current market price in the three months to September as local investors increased their holdings in the lender over the same period.
Latest shareholder profile shows foreign holdings fell from 281.66 million shares in June to 258.04 million in September, reducing their ownership in the Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed lender to 8.02 percent from about 8.8 percent.
At KCB’s opening share price of Sh90.25 on Wednesday, the selling in the three months to September translates to about Sh2.13 billion, deepening the bank’s ownership towards home investors.
The reduction in the stake held by offshore investors came after a period of high capital gains on the KCB share, which has been among the best performing at the NSE with a 30.32 percent gain over the past six months.
Between the starting of June and end of September, KCB share traded between Sh67.50 and a record Sh99.25, offering investors a profitable exit.
Foreigners had raised their stake in KCB to above 10 percent, closing March 2025 at 10.21 percent before the new wave of selling set in.
The latest foreign sell-off mirrors the trend in 2023, when overseas investors’ stake in the bank fell to about 8.66 percent in September of the same year from a peak of 29.25 percent at the end of December 2017.
Over the three-months to September this year, local institutional investors increased their holdings by 19.2 million shares to 1.52 billion while individual investors added 4.43 million shares to take their stake to 799.26 million.
The latest quarterly shift was, therefore, driven mainly by institutional investors, whose additional holdings raised their stake to 47.33 percent in September from 46.73 percent in June. The stake of local individuals rose to 24.87 percent from 24.73 percent.
The combined increase of 23.62 million shares among local investors matched the decline in foreign holdings, being the largest selling by foreign investors in a single quarter over the past 19 months to September 2026.
Foreigners had sold 29.26 million shares in the quarter ended June 2025, followed by a further 23.14 million selling in the quarter ended September last year. They then bucked the trend in the fourth quarter of last year by buying additional 13.27 million shares.
However, they have been net-sellers this year, cutting 3.64 million shares in the quarter ended March 2026, followed by 3.84 million selling in the quarter to June and a further 23.62 million in the three months to September.
In August this year, KCB Group announced that it has increased its interim dividend by 50 percent to Sh3 per share after reporting a 14.2 percent growth in net profit to Sh36 billion in the half-year ended June 2026.
The bank closed its books for the dividend on September 2 and made the distribution on November 10.
Effective May 1, 2024, Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), an international firm that provides investment data and analytics services to investors, promoted KCB Group to the MSCI frontier markets index, increasing the stock’s visibility to global investors.
KCB was elevated from the small cap index, joining the likes of Safaricom, Equity Group and East African Breweries in the constituents of frontier markets index that captures large and mid-cap stocks across 28 frontier markets.