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Chinwendu Obienyi
A resurgence of sell-offs in three consecutive trading sessions sent the Nigerian stock market’s year-to-date (YTD) return to 21.4 per cent even as investors lost a total value of N152 billion in the process.
This brought the All Share Index (ASI) down 0.94 per cent to close at 21,100.54 points while market capitalisation closed at N10.996 trillion as investors took profit in 26 stocks.
This happened as Unilever Nigeria declared a loss of N7.42 billion in profit after tax (PAT) in its audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2019 that further saw its share price falling by 10 per cent to close at N9.90 per share. Dangote Cement was next on the losers’ chart with 9.95 per cent to close at N116.80, Guinness dropped 9.92 per cent to close at 22.70, Flourmill lost 9.88 per cent to close at N19.15 while ETI depreciated 8.99 per cent to close at N4.05.
On the flipside, MTNN led the gainers’ chart with 9.33 per cent to close at N98.40 per share.
It was followed by International Breweries with a gain of 9.18 per cent to close at N5.35, Livestock feeds increased by 8.47 per cent to close at 0.64 kobo, Cadbury garnered 4.41 per cent to close at N7.10 while NAHCO rose by 4 per cent to close at N2.60.
Reacting to the development, Chief Operating Officer, InvestData limited, Ambrose Omordion, said market outlook would remain unstable during the lockdown period and beyond due to high volatility in developed and developing markets.
Omordion noted that bouquet of stimulus packages had failed to uplift the market.
“This is because there is no clear roadmap for implementing these fiscal and monetary measures to ensure that they are devoid of the usual bottlenecks”, he said.
Also commenting, analysts at Afrinvest said, they expect the bearish sentiment to continue as opportunites for bargain hunting exists in the equities market.
Meanwhile, activity level on the bourse was mixed as volume of stocks traded fell 63.4 per cent to 154.4 million units, while value traded rose by 2.5 per cent to N1.8 billion which changed hands in 3,415 deals.
The most active stocks by volume were Zenith Bank (38.7 million units), GT Bank (22.3 million units) and FBN Holdings (14.9 million units) while Zenith Bank (N443.5 million), GT Bank (N391.1 million) and MTNN (N175.7 million) led the value chart.
