The shareholders of Flour Mills of Nigeria (FMN) have approved the company’s board proposal for the payment of N1.20k per share as dividend for the financial year ended 2018, indicating a 20 per cent increase from the 2017 fiscal year.
The shareholders unanimously gave their seal at the end of the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of FMN in Lagos. The increase in the dividend payout is irrespective of the difficult business environment the company operated in, it was gathered.
For the fiscal year, the gross profit of the firm dropped to N53.4bn from N68.8bn, while the operating profit reduced to N32.3bn from N48.2bn, with investment income going down to N768.6m from N816.3m. Also, the Profit Before Tax (PBT) went down to N10.2bn from N16.4bn, while the Profit After Tax (PAT) decreased to N4bn from N13.6bn, with the earnings per share reducing to N1 from N4.83k.
Revenue generated by the company went down to N527.4bn from N542.7bn, as cost of sales went up to N474.1bn from N473.9bn, while the selling and distribution expenses jumped to N8.2bn from N6.2bn, with the administrative expenses staying flat at N19.4bn, same amount used a year earlier.
However, the company’s strategy to optimise the finance costs yielded a good result as this was slashed by 30 per cent to N22.9bn from N32.7bn in the period under consideration. The Chairman of FMN, John Coumantaros, said, “In furtherance of FMN’s purpose of feeding the nation, we made remarkable progress in 2018, as we continued to make inroads into the Nigerian market.”
