Borrow Costs Halve as Bunzl Backs Its 2026 Outlook

BZLF.Y is heading into May with a tidy tailwind — up 14% over the past month and 3% on the week to $16.37 — but the more interesting story sits in the lending market, where the cost of betting against Bunzl has collapsed by nearly 70% since late March.

The borrow market has loosened dramatically over the past six weeks. Cost to borrow peaked above 6% in mid-March, stayed elevated through late March, then fell continuously — and now sits near 1.86%, the lowest it has been all year. That kind of sustained decline in borrowing costs usually reflects short sellers unwinding positions rather than new ones being built. The short-count data corroborates this: estimated short interest dropped sharply around April 23-24, falling from roughly 185,000 shares to around 163,000 — a reduction of about 12% over the week. Availability has also loosened meaningfully, with the lending pool now carrying far more capacity than the 52-week peak tightness would have implied. The ORTEX short score — sitting at 37.9, in the lower third of the universe by percentile rank — backs up the picture: there is no accumulating short pressure here.

Utilization tells a related story. In early April it briefly spiked above 75%, the tightest it had been in months, likely coinciding with a surge in borrow demand around the tariff-driven market volatility. Since mid-April it has unwound sharply, falling to 26%. That normalization lines up precisely with the recovery in Bunzl's share price. The stock absorbed the April macro shock and bounced; shorts that piled in during the stress period have largely stepped back out.

What drew the shorts in — and then away — was probably Bunzl's Q1 trading update, released April 22. The company maintained its full-year 2026 outlook despite only modest revenue growth in the quarter, which was enough to push the LSE-listed BNZL sharply higher. Analyst sentiment, however, remains cautious. Jefferies reiterated its Underperform rating on the day of the Q1 release, and Stifel held its Hold rating the same week. Neither firm changed their stance on the numbers — which is consistent with a market that sees Bunzl as resilient but not exciting. The ORTEX analyst recommendation differential ranks in just the 7th percentile, a low reading that captures a Street leaning sideways-to-negative on the name.

Institutional ownership is stable and heavily passive. BlackRock holds the largest disclosed stake at 8.3%, followed by Vanguard at 5.5%. Among the active managers, Harris Associates added 3.4 million shares in the most recently reported period — the largest single active-manager move in the top-15 holder list — while FMR added 2.4 million and UBS Asset Management added around 2 million. Those are meaningful accumulations. Against a backdrop where analysts are cautious and short sellers have been trimming, the active-manager buying cohort is clearly seeing value that the Street consensus hasn't fully endorsed.

The EV/EBITDA multiple running near 18.5x is not especially cheap for a distribution business, but Bunzl's ev/ebit factor score ranks in the 77th percentile — above most sector peers on that measure. The dividend score of 67 reflects a solid but not outstanding income profile; the most recent dividend data in the snapshot is stale (last declared in early 2022 for the OTC-listed ADR), so readers holding the OTC line rather than the LSE primary should verify the current dividend schedule directly. The next scheduled results event lands May 26.

The setup heading into that May print is therefore less about whether Bunzl can grow and more about whether the maintained guidance holds under further macro pressure — and whether the active managers who bought in April are getting the confirmation they need.