The importance of non‐personal shareholders in Malaysian corporations is widely acknowledged. However, up till now, very little has been known about the nature of these shareowners, their manner of equity ownership (especially their size of holdings hence degree of share concentration), their country of incorporation and how they themselves are controlled i.e. whether Malaysian or foreign. This paper attempts to fill this gap with data compiled from official shareholders' lists of the largest ninety‐eight Malaysian incorporated companies engaged in manufacturing, for a point in time 1975–75, which is towards the end of the Second Malaysia Plan period. Some of the empirical findings are then compared with those of a few selected coun