MARKETS / GLOSSARY / SHARES OUTSTANDING

Shares outstanding

Shares outstanding is how many shares of the company existed at the reporting date — the number of slices the business is currently cut into.

Definition

How it is computed here

Formulaas reported on the cover of the annual filing
UnitNumber of shares
PeriodOne fiscal year, as reported
SourceExtracted from SEC filings; every value on an asset page carries the accounting tag and the filing it came from
Identifieracoes_em_circulacao
The inputs

What goes into the formula

Shares issued and outstandingThe count the company itself states, at a date it states. Not an average, and not adjusted by this site for anything that happened afterwards.
Treasury sharesShares the company has bought back and holds. They are already excluded from the outstanding count — a buyback reduces this number, it does not create a second one.

A formula without its inputs explained is decoration. Where an input is missing from a filing, the metric is left empty here rather than completed with a zero or an estimate.

Worked example

How to calculate shares outstanding, step by step

A company that bought back stock steadily for five years.

Shares outstanding, five years ago1.20B
Shares outstanding, now1.00B
Net income, five years ago$2,400M
Net income, now$2,400M
  1. Earnings per share then = 2,400 ÷ 1,200 = $2.00.
  2. Earnings per share now = 2,400 ÷ 1,000 = $2.40.
  3. Change in the share count = 1,000 ÷ 1,200 − 1 = −16.7%.
  4. Earnings per share rose 20% while the company earned exactly the same amount.

Result: 1.00B shares, down 16.7% in five years

The company did not become more profitable. The same profit is simply divided among fewer owners, so each one owns more of it.

The figures in this example are illustrative and rounded — they are not a real company. The real figures on this site are the live ones below and on every asset page, each carrying the filing it came from.

Why it matters

What shares outstanding is good for

Every per-share figure on this site — earnings per share, dividend per share — has this number as its denominator. A series of per-share figures that is rising while profit is flat is a share count story, not an earnings story, and this is where you check.

The limit

What this number does not tell you

The count is recorded AS REPORTED AT THE TIME, which means a stock split shows up here as a sudden jump that no business activity explains — a 7-for-1 split multiplies the number by seven overnight. This site detects those jumps and refuses to compute a change across one rather than publishing '+165% more shares' for a company that has been buying its stock back without pause. The figure also ignores options and convertibles that have not been exercised yet; for those, see diluted shares.

Every metric on this site is published with its blind spot stated. A figure without its limit is half a fact.

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In the data

Highest reported shares outstanding

From the most recent fiscal year of each company.

On a real company

See it in a published filing

Their sectors

These pages show the figure across up to nineteen fiscal years, with the accounting tag and the filing behind every value.

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