Visual of the Week: Econet and Ecocash Market Cap Journey (2018 - 2023)
With Delta Corporation and Innscor Africa
Our visual of the week shows five years of history in 50 seconds, tracing the development of Econet and Ecocash's combined market capitalisation compared with Innscor Africa and Delta Corporation.
Econet and Ecocash’s market capitalisations have been combined since Ecocash was previously part of Econet before the 2018 demerger and is being integrated back into Econet in 2024.
In its simplest form, market capitalisation (market cap) measures a company's size. It is calculated using the total number of outstanding shares x share price.
Click on the video below to play.
The significant highs and lows in the visual are interesting, as they show how volatile the Zimbabwean market can be. This may also indicate that shares in many Zimbabwean companies may be undervalued, considering they are currently 5-6 times lower than their historic highs.
On Econet and Ecocash, specifically, there has been a sharp drop in market capitalisation, with most of that driven by Ecocash Holdings, which at some point was the biggest company on the ZSE with a market cap and more than a $1 billion
Based on the calculations used, by the end of 2023, Ecocash had a market cap of about $ 70 million, while Econet had a Market Cap of about $230 million.
NB: This visual has been created using the market cap data from the Zimbabwean Stock Exchange, which is available in ZWL (Zimbabwe’s currency at the time) and then converted to US dollars using an unofficial parallel market-derived exchange rate.
Consequently, the data should not be taken as exact amounts but as a reasonable representation of the USD values.
There are possible exogenous aspects that can also explain large swings in the graph. Gold Coin in July 2022 is a good example (if memory serves). What would be interesting is to see the adjusted EPS & PE ratio over the same timeline.