…Cement company’s largest employer of labour
BY KENNETH EZE
Dangote Cement Plc, MTN Communications Nigeria Plc and Guarantee Trust Bank Plc top the list of income tax payers to the Federal Government of Nigeria for 2020.
This is contained in the performance analyses of 100 top elite corporate bodies on the NGX done by a Nigerian business magazine, Next Money.
The rating shows that Dangote paid N97.24 billion, MTN paid N93.6 billion, while GTBank paid N36.66 billion to rank first, second and third respectively, on income tax remittances to the FG for the year ended December 2020.
Similarly, the cement company also emerged with the highest number of employees, having a total number of 16,199 staffers on its payroll as at the time of the performance review.
In the same vein, Dangote Cement was ranked as the most capitalised company in the country with 4,173.22 billion.
Publisher, Next Money, Ray Echebiri, said the performance index analysis of companies listed on the NGX was carried out with a view to establishing the best performing ones among the over 150 listed companies.
Echebiri, a renowned financial analyst, explained that the exercise was to provide existing and potential investors with information that they can rely on for investment decisions.
He said, “The first step we take in the analyses is to extract the Total Assets of each of the listed companies from their audited accounts.
“We sorted the total assets of the companies from the largest to the smallest and cut off at the 100th. We tagged the hundred companies that emerged from this exercise ‘Nigeria’s Top 100 Companies’. Any company that makes it to the corporate elite club of Nigeria’s Top 100 Companies is automatically a candidate for further ranking by Revenues, Profits, Market Capitalization, Number of Employees and Tax Payment.”
According to him, the rankings show how the listed companies stand on the corporate ladder with regards to the various performance indices.
“In other words, the information used in the analyses were extracted from the annual reports and accounts of the various companies published in 2020 irrespective of whether a company’s year-end is March, June, September, December, or any other month in 2020,” he highlighted.
Echebiri also pointed out that the analyses were restricted to publicly-held companies in the country because the accounts of listed companies were more accessible than those of private companies.
“Moreover, accounts of publicly-held companies are more believable because they are usually subjected to regulatory scrutiny and approval,” he added.
