The Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) has granted a request by the Ghana Association of Banks (GAB) on behalf of its listed members to extend the deadline for the filing of their 2022 audited Financial Statements.
The extension was communicated in a press statement issued by the GSE, with the local bourse announcing that the eight listed banks have up to 30th April 2023 to do the filling of their 2022 audited Financial Statements.
Meanwhile, the extra time will enable the banks to work effectively with their external auditors to achieve the audit objectives.
The Ghana Association of Banks, in its request for more time, has indicated that the ongoing discussions on the debt exchange programme have affected the finalization of financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2022, by external auditors of the banks.
“In particular, the deliberations have implications for the assessment of Expected Credit Losses and their impact on 2022 financial statements. It is against this background that the date for filing of 2022 audited financial statements is extended by one month to April 30, 2023.”
GSE
The GSE called on the listed banks to conclude their audits in time after the ongoing discussions. It also encouraged the banks to publish their audited financial statements within the existing statutory timeline.
The listed banks on the Ghana stock exchange are: Access Bank Ghana, ADB, CalBank, Ecobank Ghana, GCB Bank, Republic Bank Ghana, Standard Chartered Bank Ghana, and Societe Generale.
Financial statements are the financial records that show a company’s business activity and financial performance. Companies are required to report their financial statements on a quarterly and annual basis.
Financial statements are important to investors because they can provide enormous information about a company’s revenue, expenses, profitability, debt load, and ability to meet its short-term and long-term financial obligations.
For instance, financial ratios help investors break down the enormous amount of financial data that are reported by companies and help analyze the data and make useful comparisons with other companies and other reporting periods.
This is a necessity for companies listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange to help investors have a shared idea of a company’s performance to make informed investment decisions.
Meanwhile the financial sector which is hugely represented by the banks is yet to recover from 2022 disappointing performance.
GSE Financial Stocks Index Performance
In their latest outing on the Accra bourse, the GSE Financial Stocks Index (GSE-FSI) maintained its value at 2,044.98 points, making it a 1-week loss of 0.11 percent, a 4-week loss of 0.39 percent, and a year-to-date loss of 0.37 percent.
GCB Bank led the banking sector in terms of volume of shares traded.
GCB Bank Limited (formerly known as Ghana Commercial Bank) is the largest independent financial institution in Ghana.
GCB closed its trading day (Monday, January 23, 2023) at GHS3.94 per share on the Ghana Stock Exchange.
GCB Bank is the fifth most traded stock on the Ghana Stock Exchange over the past three months (Oct 20, 2022 – Jan 23, 2023). GCB has traded a total volume of 523,428 shares valued at GHS 2.06 million over the period, with an average of 8,308 traded shares per session. A volume high of 262,620 was achieved on January 20, 2023 for the same period.
With GSE granting the banks more time, they will have more time to present a sound financial statement that will boost investors confidence culminating to impressive performance on the stock market.
