Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, is set to earn $615.83 million in dividends from his 86-percent share in his cement business for 2020.
On March 18, Dangote Cement Plc’s Board of Directors approved the company’s audited financial statements for 2020.
The board recommended a dividend of N16.00 ($0.042) for shareholders to discuss at their forthcoming annual general meeting. The date for the meeting has not been communicated as of the time of this writing (4:30pm (WAT), March 19).
The board plans to file its financial statements with the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) on or before March 31. Considering his recent losses, this would be a major win for the billionaire, who holds directly and indirectly about an 86-percent stake in the cement business.
A record from the NSE as of March 19 shows that Dangote Cement has about 17 billion (17,040,507,405) outstanding shares. MarketScreener further breaks down the number of equities held by Dangote Group and Dangote himself.
While the group holds 14,621,387,610 units in Dangote Cement, the billionaire has 27,642,637 shares. Dangote holds almost 100 percent of the shares in Dangote Group.
The math is simple: 14,654,836,368.3 x 16 = 234,477,381,892.8 ($615.83 million).
The N16.00 ($0.042) proposed dividend would mean that its earnings remained constant since 2018 when it took an uptick from the N10 per share recorded the previous year, as shown in its 2019 annual report.
The consistency of its N16.00 ($0.042) per share dividend shows its strong performance despite the challenging operating environment when the global economy stiffened due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Early in February, Dangote lost $1.2 billion in paper net worth after investors offloaded shares of Dangote Cement and Dangote Sugar Plc on the NSE, leading to a drop in his net worth to $16.6 billion.
