One of Nigeria’s Tier 1 banks, United Bank for Africa Plc, released its 2025 full-year audited and Q1 2026 unaudited results on Friday of last week. The findings showed a fall in profit for both the full year 2025 and Q1 2026.
Shareholders are concerned about the development.
The 56.8% YoY drop in NIR, which followed a N181.9 billion net trade and foreign exchange loss recorded in Q4’25, was the cause of the performance.
A 3.5x quarter-over-quarter increase in impairment for credit losses to N296.2 billion also put pressure on Q4’25, bringing the total impairment charges on financial assets for FY’25 to N329.3 billion (+29.9% YoY).
As a result, the cost of risk increased from 3.4% in FY’24 to 5.0%. Additionally, NPL and the NPL ratio both significantly climbed to N615.4 billion (+40.6% YoY) and 8.1% (+2.1ppts YoY), respectively.
Additionally, the additional 3.16 billion ordinary shares from its 2025 rights issue program caused Earnings Per Share (EPS) to drop precipitously by 41.9% YoY to N3.11 (from N5.35 in Q1’25).
A similarly slight increase in interest income to N641.1 billion (+6.9% YoY) was largely responsible for the modest 4.9% YoY growth in gross earnings to N801.5 billion. Government securities were the main source of the increase in interest income, which offset the 20.2% drop in interest income from consumer loans.
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