In its 2011 financial results, National Bank of Kenya reported profits before tax of KES 2.444 billion. This is good. What is not is that it was a drop in profits from the previous year’s profit before tax figure of KES 2.698 billion, a 9.414% drop. Interestingly though, the company’s loan book increased healthily from KES 20.844 billion to KES 26.068 billion supported by an increase in customer deposits from KES 47.804 billion to KES 57.728 billion. It is noteworthy that staff costs jumped a massive 16.249% from KES 2.267 billion in 2011 to KES 2.635 billion while director’s emoluments increased a good 28.365% in the year from KES 58.769 million to KES 75.438 million in 2011. Inflation was high in 2011 but 28 per cent?

At the Nairobi Securities Exchange yesterday, there were 129,500 NBK shares traded in 10 bids. The shares had a value of about KES 2.53 million and they successfully wiped out any gains you may have made as an investor in the previous day’s trading where they had increased in value by 20 cents by losing 25 cents today. The share closed the session at KES 19.50. The share has oscillated between KES 16 and KES 38.50 in the last year and has risen steadily and encouragingly in the last month.

Below is a snapshot of the share price movement yesterday. Forgive the rather dramatic spike in the graph, it's just 10 cents folks.

[caption id="attachment_6568" align="alignleft" width="478" caption="Source: Bloomberg.com"][/caption]