How many shares are there in total?
The company's share capital consists of 5bn ordinary 0.001p shares, giving a total authorised share capital of £50,000.
5bn is the maximum number of shares that the company can issue; to issue any shares above this limit it would have to seek the approval of its shareholders i.e. you!
With imutual, 10% of the shares (0.5bn) are assigned to staff and the remainder (4.5bn) are allocated to members. We refer to these as "staff shares" and "member shares", although in a legal sense the company only has one share class - "ordinary" - with full shareholder rights.
Initially. the "member" shares are held by a separate company "imutual member shares Limited" (IMSL) until they are earned (i.e. the member completes a transaction), at which point they are transferred to the member.
Important: Don't worry if it seems that you only own a small number of the 5bn total shares - it doesn't quite work like that! The vast majority of member shares are, at present, unearned and therefore held "in trust" by IMSL. If the company received and accepted a takeover offer, all remaining member shares still held by IMSL would be distributed to existing members prior to the takeover in proportion to their existing shareholdings.
In other words, your share of the company (in terms of potential "windfall" from a takeover) is the percentage of "earned" shares you hold, not the percentage of the total 5bn shares.
Logged-in members can check how many shares have been earned to date by viewing this report
Example: If you have earned 10,000 shares and the above report shows that 1m shares have been earned in total, then your shareholding effectively represents 1% of all member shares. If the company was bought tomorrow, 1% of any unearned shares (held by IMSL) would be transferred to you and you would receive 1% of any windfall paid out to members as a result.
See also How much are shares worth? and
Is a share only worth 0.001p?