Ndubuisi Egwim explains why a stock's per-share price is meaningless without context. A ₦525 share price with 4.1 billion shares outstanding equals a ₦65 trillion market cap. What matters is whether the company's actual business justifies that total valuation, not whether the per-share number looks cheap.
Affordable and cheap are not the same thing. Affordable and cheap are not the same thing. Let me show you what I mean. Imagine I own a company worth ₦1 million, or let's say $1 million. I divide it into 100 shares. Each share represents $10,000 of that company. Now imagine I divide exactly the same company into 100,000 shares. Each share is now $10. Has my company suddenly become cheaper? Of course not. I've simply cut the same cake into smaller pieces. So that's why when somebody tells me, Andy, it's only ₦525, or someone even referring to other stocks, it's just $10, my answer is ₦525 out of how many shares? How many shares outstanding? How many shares are on offer? Because share price multiplied by the number of shares equal to value of the company. The base IPO, this one involves around 4.1 billion new shares based on the reported total share count after the The offer. ₦525 implies an overall value of around ₦65 trillion. At recent exchange rates, that's roughly $49 billion. That's the number I care about, not the ₦525. ₦65 trillion. Because effectively I'm being asked, would you like to own a tiny piece of this company if the whole company is valued at ₦65 trillion? Hmm, that's a much harder question. And now we need to ask, what is this company producing in return for that valuation?
