A mutual shareholder or stockholder is an individual or company (including a corporation) that legally owns one or more shares of stock in a joint stock company. A company's shareholders collectively own that company and are the members of the company by signing the memorandum of association . Thus, the typical goal of such companies is to enhance shareholder value.

Stockholders are granted special privileges depending on the class of stock. These rights may include:

• The right to vote on matters such as elections to the board of directors. Usually, stockholders have one vote per share owned, but sometimes this is not the case.
• The right to propose shareholder resolutions.
• The right to share in distributions of the company's income.
• The right to purchase new shares issued by the company.
• The right to a company's assets during a liquidation of the company.

However, stockholder's rights to a company's assets are subordinate to the rights of the company's creditors. This means that stockholders typically receive nothing if a company is liquidated after bankruptcy (if the company had had enough to pay its creditors, it would not have entered bankruptcy, although a stock may have value after a bankruptcy if there is the possibility that the debts of the company will be restructured).

Stockholders or shareholders are considered by some to be a partial subset of stakeholders, which may include anyone who has a direct or indirect equity interest in the business entity or someone with even a non-pecuniary interest in a non-profit organization. Thus it might be common to call volunteer contributors to an association stakeholders, even though they are not shareholders.

Although directors and officers of a company are bound by fiduciary duties to act in the best interest of the shareholders, the shareholders themselves normally do not have such duties towards each other.

However, in a few unusual cases, some courts have been willing to imply such a duty between shareholders. For example, in California, majority shareholders of closely held corporations have a duty not to destroy the value of the shares held by minority shareholders.

Shareholders play an important role in raising capital for organizations. So these figures pose a great opportunity for all those who are looking for a lucrative option to invest money. Companies typically provide all the necessary proofs to shareholders to show that they are investing at a right place. For example, fair and reliable audit figures from income statement and balance sheet are used as evidence of overall performance for the benefit of shareholders.