By Chinwendu Obienyi
Investors in MTN’s Public Offer for Sale conducted in December 2021 have gained an estimated N35 billion since the offer closed last year.
The company listed its public offer price at about N169 per share when it made the offer public in December attracting over 126,000 Nigerians.
According to Daily Sun investigations, the company shares at the close of trading on Wednesday, closed at N230 per share and N4.68 trillion in market capitalisation on the Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX). This means that the company’s share price gained an impressive N61 per share since then or an estimated N35 billion based on 575 million shares it sold.
Reacting to the development, analysts said the gain came as a result of remote working decisions which most companies adopted following the COVID-19 pandemic to rake in gains from data subscriptions and voice calls.
“Most workers are leveraging the Internet for online education, teleworking, gaming and entertainment and there has been a rise in Internet traffic recorded by the Internet exchange point.
Internet traffic has also increased for a lot of companies and their employees after they introduced the work-from-home policy a week before the government-imposed lockdown”, they said.
MTN Nigeria had begun the year with a share price of N197 and has since gained 16.8 per cent on that price valuation. Hence, in total shares of the stock as gained a whopping N185 billion or 4.12 per cent in one week.
Meanwhile, bearish sentiments has continued to hit the stock market hard even as transactions closed on a flat note. After declining by 0.3 per cent on Tuesday, the All Share Index (ASI) closed flat while market capitalisation closed at N27.927 trillion.