Nigerian billionaire Femi Otedola's fortune has grown $400 million this year on a single bank stock

Femi Otedola is worth about $1.7 billion, up roughly $400 million since Forbes published its annual billionaires list in March, and almost the entire gain traces to one holding.

His stake in First HoldCo closed Thursday at ₦120.90 a share. On 9,983,923,216 shares, that values the position at about ₦1.21 trillion, or $875 million, which is just over half of everything Forbes counts.

Thursday alone added about $64 million to his fortune as the stock reached another record. First HoldCo's market capitalisation passed ₦5.5 trillion, close to $4 billion.

A holding that has swallowed the rest of the portfolio

Forbes valued Otedola at $1.3 billion in March, ranking him 2858th in the world and 22nd in Africa. The rest of his tracked wealth sits in a residual 5 percent of Geregu Power, hundreds of millions of dollars in cash holdings from the 2025 sale of his controlling stake in Geregu Power, a holding in Zenith Bank, and property in Lagos, Abuja, Dubai, London and Monaco.

None of those has moved the way the bank has. A stake he began building in September 2024, when First HoldCo traded at ₦30, is now larger than everything else he owns combined.

The concentration is the direct result of a decision he took in December, when he sold his controlling interest in Geregu Power to Ma'am Energy for about $750 million and recycled a substantial part of the proceeds into the bank he chairs.

From ₦47.90 to ₦120.90

The stock opened 2026 at ₦47.90. It traded around ₦62 in mid-June, closed at ₦79.35 on July 15, touched ₦105.50 on Monday and reached ₦120.90 on Thursday, a gain of about 152 percent for the year.

The rally accelerated after First HoldCo filed half-year results showing pre-tax profit up 83.5 percent to ₦653.54 billion, with second-quarter pre-tax profit of ₦332.42 billion, nearly double the same period in 2025. The group passed Zenith Bank and Guaranty Trust Holding Company this week to become Nigeria's most valuable banking stock.

Foreign institutional investors have driven much of the buying, drawn to a franchise they avoided for the better part of a decade. The group absorbed ₦826.3 billion in impairment charges during 2025 to clear legacy non-performing loans, a decision that cut full-year pre-tax profit by 70.5 percent and drew criticism at the time. It also removed the opaque loan book that had made the bank difficult for offshore allocators to underwrite. Nigeria's scheduled reclassification into the FTSE Russell Frontier Market Index in September has added further pressure on benchmark-aware funds to hold large, liquid Nigerian equities.

He kept buying into the rally

Otedola has not treated the run as a reason to take profit. He has treated it as a reason to add.

He bought 534.09 million shares at ₦30.00 in September 2024, and a further 64.87 million for ₦2.01 billion a year later. In December 2025 he acquired 370 million shares at ₦40.06. On May 13 he spent ₦43.41 billion on 549.54 million shares at an average of ₦79. Last month he took about 672.9 million shares through a private placement at around ₦44.

His largest single purchase came on Wednesday, when he spent ₦77.58 billion, about $56.2 million, on 706.13 million shares at an average of ₦109.87, above the prevailing market price. The stock closed 10 percent higher the following session.

Every tranche is now well ahead. The September 2024 block bought at ₦30.00 has quadrupled. The June placement shares taken at around ₦44 have nearly tripled in six weeks.

The concentration cuts both ways

Holding half a fortune in one stock produces the kind of gain Otedola has just recorded. It also produces the reverse.

The Nigerian Exchange caps daily price movement at 10 percent. At current levels, a single limit-down session would take about $87 million off his position, more than he made on Thursday. The stock has risen 152 percent this year on a combination of earnings recovery, index positioning and foreign inflows, none of which is guaranteed to persist.

His stake stood at 18.12 percent in the audited 2025 accounts and is now 21.96 percent. He has given no indication that he intends to stop buying, and the recapitalisation he has championed remains incomplete. Shareholders approved a ₦253.1 billion capital raise in May, part of his target of a ₦1 trillion paid-up capital base at First Bank of Nigeria, double the Central Bank of Nigeria's minimum for lenders holding international licences.

The man who spent two decades in oil and power has, in eighteen months, become primarily a bank shareholder.