Zichis Agro-Allied Industries Plc posted an after-tax profit of about N229 million in the first quarter, which is roughly 70 per cent of the N328 million it made in the entire 2025 financial year.
The company is set on another high-speed upward run-in earnings, with profit for the quarter multiplying more than nine times year-on-year from the less than N25 million it posted in the same quarter last year.
The interim financial report for the first quarter ended March 2026 shows that the company’s high-speed growth is driven by rapid revenue growth and a continuing increase in profit margins.
Revenue growth across all product lines shows the strength of the company’s self-driven internal capacity. Sales revenue surged three and a half times year-on-year to N420 million by the end of the first quarter, making up 62 per cent of the total N675.6 million turnover recorded for all of 2025.
The high growth in sales is spread across all the company’s five product lines, led by oil palm, which multiplied more than eight times to deliver sales revenue of N92.4 million. This is in line with the management’s expectation that the contribution of oil palm products to total revenue will grow substantially in the years ahead.
It is also a realisation of the company’s expectation that sales revenue will gain speed upwards with its 61-acre oil palm plantation just entering its third year of fruiting in 2026.
Sales of eggs from the company’s livestock farm remain the biggest income line with a turnover in excess of N135 million, which is an increase of 174.4 per cent year-on-year. But sales of chicken led the growth of livestock products, jumping 376.7 per cent over the period to nearly N70 million.
Sales of feed mill products also multiplied three and a half times year-on-year to N94 million, while sales of fish from its ponds grew by 73 per cent year-on-year to N28.5 million. Sales revenue from fish sales is already in excess of 81 per cent of the full year sales revenue from the product line in the entire 2025 financial year.
The company is enjoying a major boost in margins, as production costs are rising much more slowly than the surge in sales revenue. With cost of sales at N112.4 million, up 93.8 per cent year-on-year, sales revenue still grew at more than triple that pace over the same period.
This means the cost of producing a unit of sales has gone down considerably from 49 kobo in the same quarter in 2025 to less than 27 kobo in the first quarter of the current financial year.
The outcome of outstanding growth in sales and a slowdown in cost of sales is the widening of already impressive gross margin. Gross profit multiplied more than five times over the review period to stand at N307.6 million, as gross margin expanded from 50.9 percent to 73.2 percent over the period.
Further cost saving was obtained from administrative expenses, which claimed a reduced share of turnover from 25 percent in the same quarter last year to less than 16 percent at the end of the first quarter of the current financial year.
The company incurs no selling and distribution expenses and there are no finance expenses as well for the all-equity firm.
Accelerating growth in sales revenue against slowing production and operating costs are the high points of Zichis Agro-Allied Industries’ operating results in the first quarter. The outcome is exceptional gain in margins and profit volume.
With economy of scale advantage, net profit margin advanced from 21 percent in the same period last year to 54.5 percent at the end of the first quarter. This is a new peak in profit margin for the company, beating the 48.5 percent record at the end of 2025.
The huge gain in margin together with the high growth in sales revenue account for the high rise in after tax profit from less than N25 million to N228.9 million over the period.
Earnings per share multiplied nine and half times to 38 kobo at the end of the first quarter, underscoring the company as one of the fertile grounds to build shareholder wealth.
