Sefalana Holdings, Botswana’s biggest retailer on Botswana’s stock market, has generated less cash than usual. Finance director Mohamed Osman revealed this when he shared the company’s results for the year ending April 2025.
This kind of news makes shareholders pay attention. When a company has less cash, it can’t give as much money back to its investors. This is why Sefalana lowered its full year-end dividend from 65 thebe the previous year to 50 thebe. The 50 thebe dividend per share is to be paid end of August.
“We had to scale down a little bit on our year-end dividend this year, just so that we could maintain our cash condition,” Osman explained.
Osman explained.
“We will monitor this for the next 12 months and will look to increase this for next year, once the pressure on cashflow has eased for the Group and many of our large customers.”
During the year, Sefalana made P281.4 million in cash from running its business, according to the financial statements. That is less than half of the P587.9 million it made last year.
“There was a time when we had some large debtors due to us, government debtors,”
Osman said when presenting the results.
“There were some delays in the payments, and we ended up having close to P100 million due to us, and being paid to us a little bit late. So we did have a cash crunch at one stage.”
Osman admitted: “We had to take out additional overdraft facilities to support us during that difficult time.”
The company spent P299.4 million on investments, about the same as last year’s P297.4 million. After paying for these investments, only P18 million was left. But during the year, Sefalana still gave out P163 million (declared last year) to shareholders as dividends, even more than last year’s P155.4 million.
The amount of cash Sefalana had went down a little by P7.3 million. But since they started with a lot of cash — P533.9 million — they still ended the year with almost the same amount, P528.2 million. But the company also had P895 million in bills to pay, said Osman.
Looking ahead, Osman said the time after the year ended has been hard. The recent drop in the value of the pula has made customers cautious. “They are delaying buying things, hoping things will get back to normal,” he said. Many customers are just waiting to see what happens next.
