A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE OF SELECTED COMPANIES IN NIGERIA’S FCMG INDUSTRY

This study is motivated by the need to investigate how rational the investment decisions of investors in Nigeria’s stock market are. The use of ratio analysis to facilitate effective decision making in financial investments using the company’s specific fundamentals is paramount in stock portfolio selection. To investigate these process four companies were sampled from the consumer staples sector of the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FCMG) industry from the period 2014 – 2018 using a purposive sampling method. With the aid of an index, the study used profitability ratios as indicators to rank the companies in the order of performance and compared the result with an end period stock price to examine if the stock prices by virtue of how investors’ gauge them is reflected in the index rankings. The result showed a perfect order of price and index ranking, the best performer was the most expensive while the worst performer had the least price. Nestle Nigeria PLC was found to be the best-performed company while the rest three did not show much difference in their final scores. However, a Pearson Chi-square test of independence was used to investigate if the indicators or profitability ratios showed a significant association with the companies, and the result indicated no association between the variables. This goes to show that the differences posted by the remaining three companies were fragile. In that case, with strong financial engineering that would lead to improvements in at least two indicators, the second position is there for the taking

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