Guinness Nigeria Plc, has sustained its growth with an impressive 11 per cent increase in its topline revenue, despite facing severe macroeconomic challenges such as rising inflation, currency devaluation, temporary cash scarcity and insecurity for the full year period ended June 30, 2023.
The results, which were released to the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX), revealed that the company’s revenue rose to N229.44 billion from N206.8 billion in 2022. Also, cost of sales rose by 12.8 per cent to N151.308 billion as against N134.159 billion in 2022, while gross profit surged by eight per cent to N78.133 billion compared to N72.663 billion in the corresponding period of 2022.
However, Guinness Nigeria reported N18.2 billion net loss in its full year 2023 audited result following significant foreign exchange losses.
The managing director/CEO of Guinness Nigeria, John Musunga, affirmed that, the earnings and revenue growth resulted from strategic pricing and successfully deploying product mix across categories to counter cost inflation, and an optimised route-to-consumer approach that improved outlet coverage and the use of its B2B platform to improve distribution efficiency.
He noted that revenue growth was particularly strong for the strategic focus categories, Stout, Ready-to-Serve and Mainstream Spirits, saying, “although gross profit increased by eight per cent compared to the previous year, the cost of sales increase outpaced revenue growth primarily due to the prevailing macro-economic headwinds, specifically inflation, currency depreciation and the illiquidity of the forex market.”
Guinness Nigeria also reported that the company’s financial performance during the period was engendered by a number of macro-economic headwinds.
“The intense volatility in the value of the Naira and the unavailability of forex in the official foreign exchange window adversely impacted the company’s financial performance. Specifically, the Central Bank of Nigeria floated all the exchange rate windows towards the end of Q4, causing a huge devaluation of naira from N419 to N760 per US dollar and this resulted in a massive N49.1 billion unrealized forex loss in the income statement,” Musunga said.
On her part, the board chair of Guinness Nigeria, Dr. Omobola Johnson assured that, “despite macro-economic challenges, the Board maintains confidence in the company’s well-considered strategy, anticipating continued strong value creation for all stakeholders in the medium to long term.”
“It is a credit to management’s impressive performance, that, despite the macro-economic headwinds, the business delivered N23.4 billion underlying operating profit for the year ended June 30, 2023,” she added.
