By Chinwendu Obienyi
Nigerian Breweries (NB) Plc has assured its shareholders that it would perform better as well as continue to drive optimization and growth in the next financial year.
This is even as the company, yesterday, recommended a total dividend of N7.5 billion for its shareholders for the 2020 financial year. The recommendation, which amounts to a total dividend of 94 kobo per ordinary share of 50 kobo each, represents a 100 per cent payout.
Speaking at the Pre- Annual General Meeting (AGM) media briefing in Lagos, the Managing Director of the company, Jordi Bel, said the brewing company was satisfied with the financial performance in 2020 despite being affected by the impact of COVID-19, VAT increase, FX devaluation and scarcity of foreign exchange while stating that NB’s position in the market enabled it to mitigate the impact in the second half (H2) of 2020 compared with 2019.
Bel described the 100 per cent dividend payout recommendation as a demonstration of its strong performance, where it emerged as the only brewer to record a profit in a difficult year and added that the improved performance for the year could largely be attributed to the massive decline in both Administrative, Marketing and Distribution expenses for the financial year relative to the previous year.
According to him, while marketing and distribution expenses experienced a dip from N77.70 billion in 2019 to 70.7 billion in this financial year, administrative expenses experienced a 1.79 per cent decline from N19.30 billion to N18.96 billion, which was largely informed by the elimination of bad costs.
“There has been fierce competition for volume of sales in the last three years and that has affected our bottom line. We also lost a lot of market share but the good news is that we are back to growth. Today, we did not want to let go because of the challenges we have had in terms of short or long term profit because we are here for the long run not the short term.
