By Babajide Komolafe
Reflecting the impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and devaluation of the Naira, financial performance, banks’ losses to bad loans shot up by 99 percent in the first quarter of 2020 (Q1’2020), which caused profit growth rate to fall by 29 percent.
Financial Vanguard analysis of the financial results of nine out of top ten banks for the first quarter ending March 2020 showed 19.7percent year-on-year, YoY, increase in profit before tax, PBT, to N263.51 billion in Q1’20 from N243.8 billion recorded in Q1’19. This increase, however, represents 7.9 percentage decline in the profit growth rate when compared with the 27.6 percent, YoY increase recorded in Q1’19, from N216.2 billion in Q1’18.
The nine banks includes the five tier-1 banks which are Access Bank, First Bank, GTBank, UBA and Zenith Bank, and leading tier-2 banks which includes Fidelity Bank, Stanbic IBTC Bank, Ecobank Nigeria and FCMB.
Analysis revealed that the slowdown in…
Source: Vanguard Newspaper
