By Francis Ekeh
The domestic equity market, Nigeria Exchange Limited, NGX, on thursday closed on a bearish note first time this week as the NGX-ASI declined by 52bps to close at 44,625.18 points.
Consequently, the Year-to-date (YTD) return of the market weakened to 4.8% from 5.0% the previous trading day.
Top gainers in the market were led by REGALINS (+8.7%), SOVRENINS (+8.0%) and JAPAULGOLD (+7.4%). However, PHARMDEKO (-9.8%), LINKASSURE (-9.3%) and WAPIC (-8.3%) posted as today’s top losers.
For Thursday’s trading activities, the total volume traded gained 61.4% and value traded declined by 54.1% to 61.4mn units and ₦1.6bn respectively. MBENEFIT, PHARMDEKO and TRANSCORP led the volume chart with 47.8mn units, 22.6mn units and 8.9mn units respectively.
However, AIRTELAFRI, MTNN and ZENITHBANK led the value chart with ₦573.5mn, ₦340.7mn and ₦122.2mn respectively.
For indices under our purview, performance was more bullish as two indices gained and one index declined.
Meanwhile, the Industrial Goods and Oil and Gas indices closed on a marginal note.
Performance indicates that the Banking index led the gainers with 110bps, followed by the Consumer Goods index which gained 1bps. We attribute the gains to buyers’ interests in ZENITHBANK (+2.6%) and NB (+0.1%) respectively.
On the other hand, the Insurance index was the sole loser, declining by 98bps.
The loss was majorly attributed to decline in LINKASSURE (-9.3%).
Thursday’s top gainer closed with 1.8mn units of volume traded and ₦9.4mn value traded.
The company generated an average of ₦5.8bn for its gross premium written from 2017 to 2021 as reported in the latest annual audited report. The gross premium written increased by 17.2%, from ₦5.5bn in 2017 to ₦6.5bn in 2020.
However, the gross premium written declined by 21.8% to 5.1bn at the end of its 2021 fiscal year, our analysis has shown.
Furthermore, our analysis also shows that Regency Alliance Insurance in the past five years has maintained a good debt ratio. The debt ratio stood at 0.3 in 2017, and 0.4 from 2018 to 2021.