Erratic policies bane of companies’ weak results…stakeholder

Array of weak third quarter 2017 results released by companies, have been attributed to weak economy and uncertain policies that could not be relied upon for long term business decisions.

Pointer to this emerged as some of the results, Diamond Bank plc, which showed Q3 Profit after tax down declined by N2.3bn, None interest income dropped drops by 18 per cent, as early signs of inability to deliver dividend for 2017 financial year emerged.
Also, Conoil’s Q3 2017 result showed 25 per cent decline in Earnings per share (EPS), 200 per cent rise in provisions for litigation claims, drop in PBT from N2, 715,473billion in the preceding period of 2016, drop in Profit for the period weakening by 25.0 per cent to N1, 358,002,

National coordinator, Constance shareholders Nigeria, Shehu Mallam Mikhail, reacting to the weak results, attributed the poor performances to uncertain polices.

He said that “with trends of things in the economy I could not blame most companies because the economy is yet to improve as the policies are not yet certain”
He attributed uncertainty of policies that will drive business to “government’s inconsistency in policy and decision making, forcing most companies to now work under uncertain policy environment”

“Most companies now, are just working to make sure the tempo of sustainability is maintain so that things would not be shut down and any reasonable investors would only be praying to see a continuing structure of his or her investment.

He called on the government to reverse the trend by ensuring policies that will elicit public trust and rejuvenate trust by foreign investors “all these will depend on government approach to the economy”
And open a friendly approach to all the listed companies by creating an understandable committee that would understand the companies’ problem before being penalized for any single err

On what is expected of the regulators , he said “SEC and NSE need to have a coordinated approach towards understanding problems of quoted companies before releasing sanctions on them, and likewise create an avenue whereby most quoted companies would be a priority in achieving the goal of listing and at which investors would able to build a confidence approach in the quoted companies.

Bonny Amadi