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Nigerian multimillionaire banker and businessman Jim Ovia has lost millions of dollars from his stake in Zenith Bank since the start of the year, as a sell-off on the Nigerian Exchange continued to erode the robust valuation of publicly-traded companies in the financial services industry.
According to stock market data obtained from the Nigerian bourse, the market value of Ovia’s stake in Zenith Bank has decreased by more than $60 million since the beginning of the year.
The Central Bank of Nigeria’s decision to raise the benchmark interest rate to a two-decade high of 15.5 percent, a 150-basis point rise from 14 percent, triggered a new wave of sell-offs on the local bourse, which negatively impacted the group’s share price and the market value of Ovia’s stake.
The Central Bank’s move sent shockwaves through the Nigerian equity market, prompting investors to sell shares in publicly traded companies such as Zenith Bank, one of the largest listed companies on the local bourse.
The market value of Ovia’s stake in Zenith Bank has fallen by N26.12 billion ($60.41 million) this year, from N127.56 billion ($295.04 million) on Jan. 1 to N101.44 billion ($234.62 million) at the time of writing.
Zenith Bank is a leading financial services provider in Nigeria and Anglophone West Africa, licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria as a commercial bank. It is presently Nigeria’s most profitable bank and the largest listed financial services group on the Nigerian Stock Exchange.
Aside from his governance roles in the lender, Ovia, who founded the tier-one bank in 1990 and has played a seminal role in both the evolution and the digital transformation of Nigerian banking, owns a significant 16.2-percent stake in the company, or 5,072,104,311 ordinary shares.
He is on course to earn an interim dividend of N1.52 billion ($3.6 million) from his stake in Zenith Bank after the bank’s profit topped N111.4 billion ($264 million) in the first half of 2022.
The interim dividend payment comes on the heels of a dividend payment of N14.2-billion ($34.1 million) from the bank’s 2021 earnings, bringing his total dividend earnings from Zenith Bank this year to N15.72 billion ($17.7 million).
