Reuters reports South Africa’s FirstRand reported an expected 21 percent rise in full-year earnings on Tuesday but South Africa’s second biggest lender by value did not pay out a special dividend as investors had been hoping.
FirstRand said diluted normalised earnings per share, which exclude certain one-time items, came in at 331 cents from a restated 273.5 cents a year ago. The lender had given guidance that earnings would climb by as much as 22 percent.
Net interest income rose 21 percent to 29.88 billion rand ($2.76 billion) while non-interest revenue from charges such as fees and commissions rose 18 percent to 36.15 billion rand.
Profit attributable to shareholders was 18.4billion rands ($1.8billion or N297billion) a 25% increase year on year. Currently no Nigerian bank has ever posted a profit after tax of over N120billion and at N297billion is more than triple Zenith Bank (the highest in Nigeria last year) N95billion PAT.
Even when you had GTB and FBNH’s N70billion and N90billion it is still not up to N295billion in profits. Talk about Nigeria being the largest economy in Africa.
Source: Reuters/Nairametrics
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