Nigeria’s equities market ended August on a cautious note, holding onto a slim 0.31% gain despite heavy selloffs that erased much of the month’s earlier advance.
The All-Share Index opened at 139,863.5 points and briefly surged past the 146,000-mark mid-month, buoyed by momentum from July’s rally. But the gains proved fleeting.
A reversal in oil and gas stocks, combined with weakness in cement majors, dragged the benchmark down more than 3,500 points in the third week. The slide deepened with another 708-point drop in the final week, paring back almost all of August’s progress.
The index eventually closed at 140,295.5 points, just 432 points above where it began. While the headline gain looked modest, the underlying shifts were stark: some of Nigeria’s wealthiest investors booked billions in paper profits, while others absorbed steep markdowns in their banking and energy holdings.
Against this backdrop, fortunes tied to cement, consumer goods, energy, and finance experienced mixed reactions in terms of share price gains as well as losses.
In this article, we look at Nigerian billionaires with the highest share gains/losses in August 2025.
Loss: -N37 billion
Jim Ovia, founder and chairman of Zenith Bank, saw a sharp drop in his paper wealth in August after the lender’s stock fell on the Nigerian Exchange.
Zenith’s share price opened the month at N76.50 but closed at N66.00, a decline of N10.50 per share, or about 14%.
Ovia holds a direct stake of 3.55 billion shares in the bank. That position was worth nearly N272 billion at the start of August but had slipped to about N234 billion by the end of the month.
The difference amounts to an estimated N37 billion loss in just four weeks, making Ovia one of the hardest hit among Nigeria’s billionaire investors.
The setback highlights the risks of having a fortune tied closely to the fortunes of a single company, even one as dominant as Zenith Bank.
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