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Shareholders approve Dangote Sugar’s N4.8bn dividend

By BusinessNews Staff on May 26, 2015

Shareholders of Dangote Sugar Refinery have approved the payment of N4.8bn dividend, which translates into 40 kobo per share, as dividend for the year ended December 31, 2014.

The shareholders approved the dividend at the company’s 9th Annual General Meeting in Lagos.

This followed a year, which the Chairman, Dangote Sugar, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, described as challenging.

Dangote said despite the challenges, the company, however, recorded a turnover of N95bn, profit before tax of N15.3bn and profit after tax of N11.6bn as against a PBT and PAT of N16.3bn and PAT of N10.8bn the previous year.

He told the shareholders that the company would sustain its policy of returning part of its profits as dividends to the shareholders after each year, regardless of the challenges, stressing, however, that the dividend paid would be determined by the company’s performance, investment decisions and liquidity, among other things.

Dangote said, “In view of the significant investments required for our backward integration projects, the company is in need of additional funding. As such, the Board has taken the decision to reduce dividend payment for the year from 60 kobo per share to 40 kobo.

“This is a transitional situation, requiring our short-term sacrifices in order to build for the future, and is necessary for us to maintain prudent capital and liquidity levels to sustain our operations, in tandem with our backward integration projects.”

He explained that the company had to tackle challenges resulting from the increased insecurity in the North East and other issues.

On the impact of the challenges, he said, “Access to our key markets was hampered, while we also had to grapple with reduced consumer purchasing power and periodic menace of low-priced unlicensed imported sugar. Notwithstanding this, our local sales volumes exceeded 780,000 tonnes in 2014, a slight reduction on the prior year.”

On the future, he said the company had a target to produce 1.5 million tonnes of refined sugar from locally grown sugarcane, processed at its facilities in Nigeria 10 years from now.

Dangote added, “We will maximise opportunities to benefit from the extended value chain in sugar production, with fuel ethanol and the generation of electricity from our factories. We believe that our expansion project will generate more than 100,000 job opportunities in the coming decades.”

[Punch]

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