🍞 The NGX is the world's best stock exchange? How manage?

Hello,

This is Demilade writing to you with mixed feelings. Happy because my Nigerian stock portfolio has been validated by Bloomberg, not so happy because one cannot eat a stock portfolio 🙃

Over the last two years, the Nigerian Stock Exchange has grown 175% in dollar terms. If you put in $100 in July 2024, it’ll be $275 today. Almost no other liquid investment has seen this growth, not Bitcoin, not Nasdaq (42%) powered by the AI Capex boom, not Japan (+62%) or S&P 500 (+34%). Sometime last year, I started to pay closer attention; I told friends that I was liquidating all my non-Nigerian holdings and rotating to the NGX. For me, the decision was simple: Nigeria’s exchange rate had been stable for over a year, and the devaluation of 2023 had caused otherwise amazing companies to trade much lower than their intrinsic value. As I started to research, I found great stories all over the exchange; from daring acquisitions to radical operational overhauls, several of the 150 companies on the exchange were actively finding ways to rapidly increase shareholder value.

Last week, Bloomberg announced that Nigeria's Stock Exchange overtook the Kopsi (Korean Stock Exchange) to become the best-performing in the world. In this edition, we take a look at the top 5 most interesting company stories from around the NGX.
Note: This is not about the largest market cap stocks, or the highest growth in value; this edition is about 5 of the most compelling company stories we’ve seen in the last 12 months. We definitely won’t cover everything, and this isn’t investment advice.

But we do want to hear from you! Send us an email with the companies from the NGX and why, and we’ll feature the best answers in the next issue.

Enjoy! And as usual, send this to someone who would find it interesting!

Stocks: The NGX kept its title as the world's best-performing market in dollar terms, even as June's momentum cooled into a more selective, earnings-driven week ahead of insurers' July 30 recapitalisation deadline and banks' race toward Otedola's N1 trillion benchmark.

Currency: The naira slipped 0.85 percent to N1,381.70/$1 on the week even as external reserves climbed to a fresh multi-year high of $51.74 billion, a divergence that leaves the currency's stability, the engine behind this year's dollar returns, looking resilient but not yet fully secure.

Commodities: Nigeria's crude output hit a 74-month high of 1.56 million bpd in June, running above its OPEC quota for a fourth straight month, just as renewed Iran-linked tensions pushed global oil prices higher and handed Africa's biggest producer a rare moment of pumping more into a stronger market.

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Sometime in the third quarter of last year, a company I had never heard of kept catching my eye. Beta Glass, a company that makes bottles, was up more than 500% for the year. Not going to lie, I refused to research this company for several months, as I thought it was a meme stock and would likely have low liquidity and be impractical to trade. Besides, how valuable can glass making be?

Eventually, my curiosity in the company piqued when Helios Investment Partners, one of Africa's largest private equity firms, agreed to buy Frigoinvest Nigeria Holdings B.V. (the holding company for Beta Glass Plc and Frigoglass Industries Nigeria Ltd), for €100 million. The deal completed in February this year, handing Helios a 55.2% controlling stake and triggering a mandatory offer to minority holders at ₦590.94 a share.

That was a clear signal. When a firm as disciplined as Helios, known for investing in telecom towers and natural gas infrastructure, pays up to take outright control of a Nigerian manufacturer, the share price is no longer the point. Something structural had changed.

By July this year, Nigeria's benchmark index had returned about 67% in dollar terms for the year, narrowly ahead of South Korea's Kospi, which has been on a rally because its two largest companies are riding the AI wave.

As a Nigerian, or anyone from an emerging market, you already know why "in dollar terms" is doing the heavy lifting. The old trap is that Naira dominared investments gains get swallowed by devaluation, so a spectacular naira return quietly becomes a dollar loss by the time it reaches your account. That is the reflex that has kept a generation of both local and diaspora professionals focused on crypto and foreign equities over Nigerian stocks.

This year broke the pattern. The naira has strengthened, up roughly 4% against the dollar for the year to date and closer to 10% over the past twelve months (Yes you’re reading this right- Naira is appreciating!). A rising currency is what converts a local rally into a real dollar return rather than an illusion. For once, the number on the screen is close to the number in your pocket.

So the question for every reader is no longer "will devaluation eat my gains". It is "what is actually driving it, and can it last?". Behind the index sits a wave of ownership change: international majors handing oilfields to indigenous buyers, multinationals selling consumer icons to local champions, private equity taking control of manufacturers, banks racing to rebuild capital, and a stable naira making debt-funded deals financeable again.

Here are the five stories that we believe are shaping the market. P.s This is not investment advice 😀

The single biggest story in Nigerian business right now is a handover. The international oil majors, Shell, Exxon, Eni, are retreating from the onshore Niger Delta, and indigenous companies are stepping into their place. Aradel is the clearest example of this.

Aradel moved to the main board of the NGX in October 2024, immediately becoming the largest oil and gas company on the exchange. Then, at the very end of December 2025, it closed two transformational deals. First, it raised its stake in the domestic producer ND Western from 41.67% to 81.67%, and in the same move lifted its interest in Renaissance Africa Energy, the Nigerian consortium that bought Shell's former onshore assets, from 33.3% to 53.3%. Total assets jumped 466% in a single year to ₦9.9 trillion, funded in part by roughly ₦504 billion of fresh borrowing. The stock is up about 128% for the year to around ₦1,527, and is the single largest driver of an oil and gas index that has itself risen more than 90%.

Aradel's audited profit after tax rose 192% to ₦757.3 billion, but most of that leap came from two one-off items: a ₦217.1 billion gain on a bargain purchase and a ₦393.2 billion currency gain. Strip those out and the underlying year is far more ordinary. The acquired fields only begin contributing to earnings in 2026, which makes this year the real test of whether the deals were worth it.

The currency story runs through both sides of their books. Debt-funded acquisitions of this size are only sensible when the naira is expected to hold, and the same appreciation that made the borrowing viable also flowed straight into that ₦393.2. billion gain. This confidence, driven by a stable exchange rate is a recurring theme for the companies we covered..

If you want to see, in one deal, exactly what currency stability unlocks, look at UACN's acquisition of CHI Limited.

UACN bought CHI, the maker of Chivita, Hollandia and Capri-Sun, from The Coca-Cola Company, its boldest move in years, taking it into dairy, juices and value-added drinks where it had no presence. The deal is the cleanest example of a typical LBO that Nigeria has had in years. It was funded with ₦30.8 billion from UACN’s cash and a ₦151.6 billion twelve-month dollar bridge loan, roughly 83% debt, which was refinanced into a seven-year naira facility and a ₦150 billion bond programme.

A dollar bridge loan secured on a Nigerian asset is only financeable when lenders trust the naira to hold its value over the life of the loan. In the devaluation years, this deal does not get done. A stable, gently appreciating naira is precisely what made it viable. This is what "easier to take on debt in a stable environment" looks like in the wild.

The debt bit hard, as it does. Interest cover fell from about 3x times to 1.1x, making it a riskier asset and pre-tax profit dropped 71% in 2025 under the financing weight, before CHI's consolidation reversed the picture sharply: first-quarter 2026 revenue rose about 240% and pre-tax profit about 348%.

The stock itself is up over 300% this year.

If Aradel is the oil version of the handover, Guinness is the consumer version.

Diageo, the owner of the Guinness brand globally, sold its 58.02% majority in Guinness Nigeria to Tolaram, the group behind Nigeria’s national dish Indomie, at the end of September 2024. Tolaram has since built its stake to 70.86% stake. Crucially, Diageo did not abandon the brand. It kept ownership of Guinness, manufacturing the drink and licensing it back, so the stout keeps flowing while the ownership and distribution pass to a local operator with far deeper reach.

The turnaround has been dramatic. Guinness Nigeria went from a ₦54.7 billion loss for the year to June 2024 to a ₦41.2 billion profit over the eighteen months to December 2025, with revenue up 144% to ₦730.8 billion. First-quarter 2026 pre-tax profit rose about 53% year on year.

This is a template, not a one-off. Across the market, multinationals have reassessed Nigeria under the weight of devaluation and inflation, and handed iconic businesses to local groups who can run them harder. In the beverage sector, we spoke about this with Heineken's sale of Champion Breweries to EnjoyCorp.Tolaram's manufacturing and distribution muscle, paired with Diageo's brand-building, is the model others will copy.

Devaluation and surging input costs were the wound that drove Diageo out, and stabilisation is part of the healing, but the engine is the ownership reset. Tolaram, a Singaporean company deeply entrenched in Nigeria, doubling down on its largest market.

The rally of the Nigerian stock market has been led by banks, and no bank tells a sharper story than the parent of Nigeria's oldest lender.

The backdrop is the Central Bank's recapitalisation drive, which set a ₦500 billion minimum for banks with international licences by March this year. The foreground is Femi Otedola. He has consolidated his grip on the company to roughly 20.4%, after his long-standing rivals Oba Otudeko and Oye Hassan-Odukale abruptly exited, selling around 10.4 billion shares, close to a quarter of the company, off-market in a single day in July 2025.

With control settled, the group performed radical surgery. It absorbed a one-off impairment of about ₦826 billion in its 2025 accounts to clear decades of legacy bad loans in one hit. The move wiped out that year's headline profit, but it scrubbed the balance sheet clean. The first-quarter 2026 pre-tax profit rose 72% to ₦321.1 billion, with an annualised return on equity of 31.6% the best among the country's five largest banking groups.

Otedola is not stopping at compliance. He is pushing First HoldCo toward a ₦1 trillion capital base, double what the CBN requires, and arguing publicly that the Central Bank should lift the minimum to match. Reaching it first would force his peers into dilutive raises on a timetable he sets rather than the regulator.

Again, currency stability underwrites the confidence that makes a recapitalisation of this scale possible.

The last name is less a transaction than a demonstration. Airtel Africa shows, in one profit and loss statement, how the naira turn actually works.

For two years, devaluation buried Airtel's reported earnings under foreign exchange losses. This year the direction reversed. Finance costs for the year to March 2026 included $127 million of derivative and foreign exchange gains, largely on account of naira appreciation, and profit after tax rose 147% to $813 million. Same company, same markets.

Around that, the catalysts are stacking up. Airtel is preparing to list its mobile money arm, Airtel Money, targeting London in the second half of 2026 at a valuation some reports put as high as $10 billion. It has launched a fresh share buyback, and its parent, Bharti, is raising its stake toward 90%. On the NGX, Airtel drove one of the year's biggest single-day index moves and it is now the most valuable company on the exchange, rising +155.57% and valued at NGN21.7 trillion

The 2026 rally is a re-rating built on two things at once: a wave of ownership change, and a currency that finally stopped punishing patient investing. Majors are handing over oilfields. Multinationals are selling consumer icons to local groups. Private equity is buying manufacturers outright. Banks are rebuilding capital. And a stable naira is making leverage possible again, from UACN's dollar bridge to Aradel's acquisition debt.

Whether it holds depends on the same forces that started it: exchange-rate stability, reform continuity, and whether the deals now sitting on these balance sheets convert into real 2026 earnings rather than one-off accounting gains. Those are the things to track between now and the next set of results.

For all readers, the one genuinely new fact is the simplest. This time, for now, the returns are real in dollars too.

This is analysis for Daily Bread readers, not investment advice. Do your own research before you invest.

⛽️ Nigeria's crude output hits a 74-month high, above OPEC quota: Nigeria pumped 1.56 million barrels of crude a day in June, the highest since April 2020, according to the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission. That's 104 percent of the country's 1.5 million bpd OPEC quota, up from 102 percent in May, and the fourth straight month of growth. Including condensates, combined output averaged 1.74 million bpd, with a peak day touching 1.89 million. NUPRC credits stable operations and an absence of major pipeline outages, the security dividend of cracking down on theft and hiring former militants as protection. Oil still funds 65 to 70 percent of export earnings even though it's a sliver of GDP, so this quietly matters more than the headline suggests. Nigeria is chasing 2 million bpd, and June's numbers make that look less like ambition and more like a plan on schedule.

⛴️ Dangote pitches a 500,000-job blue economy plan, backed by six priority sector At the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy's Q2 stakeholder engagement in Lagos on July 2, Aliko Dangote, represented by Dangote Port Operations MD Simeon Omole, laid out where he thinks capital should go: port infrastructure and logistics, maritime manufacturing and shipbuilding, fisheries and aquaculture, marine technology and data services, marine renewable energy, and coastal tourism. The headline number is fisheries: Nigeria still imports nearly $1 billion of fish a year despite rising domestic output, a gap Dangote argues aquaculture, cold-chain logistics and export infrastructure could close while creating over 500,000 jobs. It's the newest limb of Dangote's port ambitions, which already include deep seaport projects at home and talks with Tanzania on regional logistics. The government's blue economy policy targets three million jobs and 7 percent annual sector growth within four years, with half of new roles reserved for Nigerians aged 18 to 35, but as with most of these engagements, the plan is still mostly framework and intent rather than committed capital.