UPDATED: Access Holdings’ half-year profit weak despite increased revenue

Access Holdings recorded a weaker net profit due to strong cost measures, despite recording a new revenue milestone for the first half of the year.

According to its audited earnings report issued on Saturday, post-tax profit for Nigeria’s biggest lender stood at N281.3 billion, about 12.8 per cent of the N2.2 trillion gross earnings.

The performance reflects the challenges the financial services group faced in turning revenue into profit.

The N1.3 trillion the big lender earned mainly from loans and its investment in financial assets more than doubled compared to a year ago.

However, 65.1 per cent of that was eaten away by what it paid depositors for keeping their money and other borrowing costs, causing net interest income to stand at just N513.4 billion.

The performance is more underwhelming when the impact of problematic loans is factored in.

The group set apart N122.7 billion of its interest income to cover loans not certain to be repaid by borrowers who have missed several repayments. That figure was more than three times the corporation’s provision for the same purpose a year ago.

It implies that what was left for the lender after impairment charges were deducted was N390.7 billion.

Nigerian banks have been riding on the wave of rate hikes by the central bank since May 2022 to charge more for the loans and advances they grant to borrowers.

That has formed the cornerstone of the record profits a couple of them have recorded for the first half of the year. Access Holdings’ top-tier rival Guaranty Holding Company booked the biggest profit on record by any public company as its first-half profit, announced this month, hit N905.6 billion.

Lenders that hold financial securities in foreign currency are also receiving a sharp boost to their profit because a sharp surge in the rate of exchanging naira for a dollar has jumped significantly, following a devaluation of the local currency this January.

Access Holdings reported N253.9 billion in foreign exchange gains for the period under review, compared to N244.3 billion a year ago.

In May, the financial services provider acquired 97 per cent of the ownership of African Banking Corporation (Tanzania) Limited, having taken over African Banking Corporation Zambia Limited earlier in the year.

Total assets stood at N36.6 trillion at the end of the review period, compared to N26.7 trillion at the end of last year.