Nigeria: AP Assures Good Returns on Investment

Peter Ailuorio
Lagos

Potential investors in the AP Public Offer currently on, have been assured good dividend return on their investment and therefore urged to embrace the offer.

In a chat with Journalists at the weekend in Lagos, the Chief Operating Officer of the company, Mr. Tunde Falasinnu, said that the company was back on its feet and had strong fundamentals, courtesy of restructuring and re-organisation of the company put in place by the new board led by Mr. Femi Otedola.

He declared that sterling performance evidenced by its half year result was enough to put all doubts to rest about the future of AP.

He stated that investing in the offer means a secured future for the investors.

"You are buying a stock that you know you can have a return on your investment. I think that is the key word I can use. If I buy at N250 today, even if I look at capital gain, in two, three weeks or a month after the closure, it is appreciating to about N300 or about N350, because if you look at our colleagues in the market today that are on N350, Chevron is almost N400. So capital gain immediately comes to you, and like we said also, our price at the market today is almost N300. Buying at N250 means you already have the capital gain of N50. So if you look at it, definitely there is something the investor will gain by buying the shares today."

From a comatose state, AP according to him, is now the company to beat in the downstream sector.

In response to a question on what was responsible for the massive appreciation of the shares in the market, Falasinnu declared that it was a measure of the confidence of the investing public. "First of all for any investor, you must have confidence in the company.

And the confidence is looking at what the future hold for this company. For any one who witnessed our facts behind the figures, which we presented at the floor of the stock exchange, you would notice our plans and what we intend to do with the money, when we raise it.

What we've done in the last one year has been tremendous for this company and that necessitated the growth we had. What has driven our price to the level it is, is that the company has been revamped.

For investors that saw AP almost dying, and now realised suddenly something has happened, change has come in, profit is coming; dividend that was never paid is being paid; you notice that in the past four or five years nothing was paid until N1 came in, now N7 and from our prospectus we are projecting N11, as forecast, but I know we will not do less than N8 no matter the disruption in the system."

Source: www.allAfrica.com

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