By Aduragbemi Omiyale
Wema Bank Plc has confirmed that it will begin the process of raising fresh funds through the rights issue in the third quarter of 2023.
A rights issue is the process of sourcing capital from existing shareholders by offering them the opportunity to acquire additional shares of the company at a specified price.
The Managing Director of Wema Bank, Mr Moruf Oseni, while commenting on the financial performance of the lender in the first half of this year, said the company was confident about raising funds from the beginning of next month, especially because of improved stability in the operating environment.
In the period under review, Wema Bank showcased strong performance as it doubled its profitability and gross earnings.
In the results, the commercial bank improved its gross earnings on a year-on-year basis by 49 per cent to N89.09 billion from N59.59 billion in the first half of last year.
It was observed that the interest income was up by 53 per cent to N76.11 billion from N49.75 billion in the same period of 2022, as the non-interest income grew by 32 per cent to N12.98 billion from N9.85 billion.
As for the bottom line of the results, the profit before tax was up by 97 per cent to N12.05 billion from N6.13 billion, as the post-tax profit went up by 97 per cent to N10.48 billion from N5.30 billion.
Business Post reports that the bank grew its deposit year to date by 19 per cent as of H1 2023 to N1.393 trillion from the N1.166 trillion reported in FY 2022, as loans and advances grew by 20 per cent to N627.01 billion in H1 2023 from N521.43 billion in FY, 2022.
“Our H1 2023 results saw significant upsides with profit before and after tax growing strongly by about 97 per cent.
“The management team at Wema Bank is focused on driving the execution of our current corporate strategy.
“Our embrace of technology is helping us deliver seamless best-in-class services while offering compelling value propositions to customers. Hence, we are seeing record-breaking returns across the board.
“Finally, we continue to see improvements in our corporate, commercial, and retail businesses as evidenced by our strong loan growth,” Mr Oseni said.
“It has been a good half-year performance for Wema Bank, with gross earnings growing by 49% year on year and earnings per share at 163.0 kobo.
“In addition, our cost-to-income ratio at 72.71 per cent has witnessed significant improvement from the previous period.
”We have also succeeded in making Wema Bank an integral part of the Fintech ecosystem in Nigeria with our ubiquitous fintech infrastructure support play,” he added.
Dipo Olowookere