Nigerian billionaire Femi Otedola's First HoldCo stake tops $700 million as best-performing bank stock hits record

First HoldCo shares reached an all-time high of ₦105.50 on Monday morning, lifting the value of chairman Femi Otedola's holding to about ₦978.8 billion, or $709 million, hours before the banking group files its first-half results.

Otedola holds 9,277,792,037 ordinary shares, equal to 20.42 percent of issued capital, making him the largest individual shareholder in Nigeria's oldest bank and the second-largest holder overall behind RC Investment Management, which holds 10.43 billion shares. The record price pushes the group's market capitalisation to roughly ₦4.8 trillion, about $3.5 billion.

The stock opened the year at ₦47.90. At ₦105.50 it is up about 120 percent year to date, a return no other Nigerian banking stock has matched in 2026 and one that places First HoldCo ahead of every tier-one lender on the exchange.

Three sessions at the ceiling

The move has come in a rush. First HoldCo closed at ₦79.35 on July 15, which makes Monday's price a gain of about 33 percent across three trading sessions.

The Nigerian Exchange caps daily price movement in equities at 10 percent. Three consecutive moves at that limit from ₦79.35 would produce ₦105.62, placing Monday's high within a few kobo of the maximum the rules permit over that span. The stock has traded at or near its ceiling in each of the last three sessions.

Volume has run well above normal throughout. A record 1.26 billion shares changed hands in a single session on July 9, and First HoldCo has ranked among the three most actively traded names on the exchange over the past quarter. Cumulative volume passed 2.4 billion shares by mid-May and has accelerated since.

Why it has outrun the sector

Nigerian bank stocks have had a strong year in aggregate, lifted by high interest rates, wide net interest margins and the completion of the recapitalisation exercise the Central Bank of Nigeria imposed in 2024. What separates First HoldCo is that it entered 2026 from a far lower base than its peers.

The group absorbed ₦826.3 billion in impairment charges during 2025 to provide against legacy non-performing loans accumulated over decades. The write-down cut pre-tax profit by 70.5 percent to ₦235 billion and post-tax profit by 79.4 percent to ₦139.5 billion, and left the non-performing loan ratio at 12 percent. The stock was priced accordingly.

The recovery since has been arithmetic. Pre-tax profit rose 72.2 percent year on year to ₦321.1 billion in the first quarter, placing First HoldCo second in Nigeria's tier-one banking profit table behind Zenith Bank. A franchise carrying the largest branch network and deposit base in the country, priced as a distressed asset, has been repriced as a functioning one.

Foreign institutional money is driving it

Foreign institutional investors have been pouring capital into the stock, and their buying accounts for much of the move. The scale of participation has reset the shareholder base of a bank that offshore allocators had largely avoided for a decade.

The appetite reflects a reassessment of risk following the clean-up Otedola pushed through. The provisioning decision was criticised at the time for the damage it did to reported earnings. It also removed the opaque loan book that had made the franchise difficult for international investors to underwrite, and replaced it with a disclosed position they could model.

Management has since met or beaten its own guidance across consecutive quarters and executed a recapitalisation without incident, the kind of record offshore money rewards. Nigeria's scheduled reclassification into the FTSE Russell Frontier Market Index in September has sharpened the case further, obliging passive and benchmark-aware funds to hold large, liquid Nigerian equities. First HoldCo's free float and daily turnover place it in the narrow group that qualifies.

Every tranche he bought is deep in profit

Otedola has built the position through open-market purchases since taking the chairmanship in January 2024, most executed through Calvados Global Services, his investment vehicle, and disclosed in filings to the exchange.

He acquired 534,094,407 shares at ₦30.00 in September 2024, a tranche now showing a paper gain of about ₦40.3 billion. He bought 64.87 million shares for ₦2.01 billion in September 2025. In December 2025 he purchased 370 million shares at ₦40.06, a holding now worth ₦39 billion against a ₦14.8 billion cost.

His largest single purchase came on May 13, when he spent ₦43.41 billion on 549,535,653 shares at an average of ₦79. That tranche has gained about ₦14.6 billion in ten weeks.

The stake stood at 8,055,314,486 shares, or 18.12 percent, in the audited 2025 accounts. He has added more than 1.2 billion shares since.

Shareholders approved a ₦253.1 billion capital raise at the annual general meeting on May 29, part of Otedola's target of a ₦1 trillion paid-up capital base at First Bank of Nigeria, double the central bank's ₦500 billion minimum for banks holding international licences. A ₦45 billion private placement tranche was completed in June at ₦44.06 a share, a price now less than half the market.