May & Baker Strategises to Sustain Growth, Posts N218m Profit

The Managing Director/CEO of May & Baker, Nnamdi Okafor, has said that the company has re-strategised to sustain its growth tempo. He made this disclosure while speaking on the company’s unaudited results for the nine months ended 30 September 2017, released to the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE).

He said: “Every sector of the economy has its opportunities and threats; we have chosen to adopt survival strategies to achieve our target figures.”

According to the company’s unaudited results, revenue grew by 16.5 per cent to N6.926 billion, up from N5.944 billion in the corresponding period of 2016. Cost of sale stood at N4.77 billion, compared with N4.24 billion in 2016.

Gross profit rose to N2.155 billion, from N1.704 billion in 2016. Administrative expenses fell from N464 million to N455 million, while finance cost increased from N479 million to N378 million in 2016.

Profit before tax soared by 386 per cent from N66.288 million to N322 million, while profit after tax rose by 392 per cent from N44.397 million to N218.506 million in 2017. The earnings per share which stood at 4.53 kobo in 2016 jumped to 22.3 kobo in 2017.

Meanwhile, trading at the stock market rebounded to close positively yesterday with the NSE ASI appreciating by 0.22 per cent to be at 37,013.57. Similarly, market capitalisation improved to N12.81trillion.

The appreciation recorded in the share prices of FBN Holdings, Zenith Bank, GTBank, UBA, and Dangote Cement was mainly responsible for the gain recorded yesterday. The total value of stocks was N2.91 billion, staked on 305.17 million shares in 4,399 deals.

The three most actively traded sectors were: Financial Services (211.81 million shares), Consumer Goods (55.33 million shares), and Industrial Goods (18.09 million shares), while the most actively traded stocks Diamond Bank (83.12 million shares), Fidelity Bank (39.92 million shares) and Cadbury (37.84 million shares).

In terms of sector performance, two out of five indices trended northwards while two closed in the red and one flat. The NSE Industrial Goods Index and the NSE Banking Index were the gainers, up 0.5 per cent apiece, on the back of gains in Dangote Cement Plc(+0.9 per cent), Zenith Bank (+0.4 per cent) and GTBank (+0.7 per cent). The NSE Consumer Goods Index led losers with 0.7 per cent, while the NSE Oil & Gas Index went down by 0.2 per cent.

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