With the agriculture sector becoming more active, investors on the floor of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) have started looking towards the sector as they invested N48 million in one week.
Reviewing the stock market trading for the week ended April 22, 2016, the Agriculture Industry came third with a turnover of 32.313 million shares worth N48.460 million in 247 deals.
The turnover, in terms of volume traded, represents 3.65 per cent on the total trade carried out by the period under review.
The Financial Services Industry led the activity chart with 747.817 million shares valued at N3.832 billion traded in 8,768 deals, contributing 84.46 per cent while the Consumer Goods Industry followed with 45.517 million shares worth N977.579 million in 2,145 deals.
The sector, which has five stocks listed on it, under crop production subsector has FTN Cocoa, Okomuoil and Presco. Fishing/hunting/tapping sub-sector has Ellah Lakes while Livestock is listed under Livestock/Animal Specialities sub-sector. For the week under review, Livestock traded 31.7 million shares valued at N29.53, followed by Okomuoil with a transaction of 566,448 shares at N16.76 million, Presco traded 60,935 shares worth N2.15 million and FTN Cocoa accounted for 32,000 shares valued at N16,000.
Analysts on the floor of the NSE, said that with government’s attention shifting to developing the non-oil sector in the face of dwindling oil revenue, the agriculture sector on the NSE in a short time will start to post impressive results and return to investors. They noted that the poor performance of the Nigerian agriculture sector, in terms of its contribution to the country’s total revenue, has led successive governments to embark on and implement several agricultural policies and initiatives aimed at reviving the sector.
Speaking, the managing director of InvestDate Limited, Mr Ambrose Omordion, said, “Agriculture has a lot of prospects and diversifying the economy will correct its age-long dependence on oil. The agriculture sector will enjoy funding from the federal government as well as the banks in fulfilling government plan to boost food production. We recommend hold for long term investors and traders should wait for retracement before jumping.”
He added that it is expected that the sector, which has always lamented the unavailability of funds and poor funding, would make the best use of the funds earmarked for the sector by the federal government to sustain their encouraging contribution to the nation’s gross domestic product.
Source: Leadership
