29th October, 2018
Determined to strengthen market share, May & Baker Nigeria Plc on Monday said it was targeting a turnover of N50 billion by 2023 on the back of new investments.
Mr Nnamdi Okafor, the company’s Managing Director, gave the projection at a news conference in Lagos on the 980 million rights offer.
Okafor said that the company was expecting to hit a turnover of N50 billion by 2023 from N9.35 billion achieved for the financial year ended December 31, 2017.
He said that the projections had taken cognizance of the maturity of some of its new investments in vaccines, sickle cell drugs and herbal medicines.
“Our projections for the next five years, 2019 to 2023, is to achieve a quantum leap in both revenue and profits,” Okafor said.
He said that “the company is making strategic investments which started over 12 years ago when we invested in the construction of anti-retroviral drugs in Nigeria in 2006″.
Okafor added that the company was investing in key areas of healthcare with both comparative and competitive advantage.
On the company’s ongoing N2.45 billion rights issue, he called on the shareholders to pick up their rights, noting that “the harvest time is now”.
He said that the company had some significant agreement from its majority shareholders to embrace the offer.
“We are comfortable with the level of commitment we have from majority shareholders, if not, we would not have gone to the market,” Okafor said.
He said the new funds would be used to strengthen shareholders investments and make the company more profitable.
Okafor noted that the impact of the proceeds of the rights would begin to manifest in 2019, adding that new shares would benefit from the dividends from 2018 earnings.
The managing director said that the company’s plan was to invest the proceeds of the rights issue in some key projects.
He said that over N400 million of the expected N2.45 billion would be used to finance part of its equity in Biovaccines Nigeria Ltd, the joint venture company for local vaccine production.
Okafor said that over N500 million would be invested on capacity expansion for one of its cash cow products, paracetamol, while marketing and branding building will gulp over N500 million.
According to him, about N400 million will be used to offset part of its current loan portfolio of about N950 million, while the remaining will be used to buy working capital.
“Our new strategic focus since 2017 is to build an international brand within the sub-Sahara Africa market, ” he said.
Okafor said the company’s strategic goal was to become a preferred brand in Nigeria with the clear leadership and to become a regional healthcare powerhouse with strong and wide footprints in the sub-Saharan market.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the company is offering a rights issue of 980 million new shares of 50k at N2.50 per share on the basis of one new share to one share currently held.
The offer which opened on Oct. 22 is expected to close on Nov. 28.