2011 Year Review of CAL Bank on the Ghana Stock Exchange.

Overview of Company

 CAL Bank Limited formerly Continental Acceptances Limited and then CAL Merchant Bank was incorporated on March 20, 1989 but the bank was licensed in June 1990 and commenced business in July 1990. With issued shares of 238,802,978, CAL Bank is listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) and the share price is 0.23p as at December 6, 2011. We would be looking at how this bank performed on the GSE for the 2011 financial year.
As at 31st December, 2010, the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) held 82,363,074 shares in the bank making 34.13% whiles Mr. Afare Donkor, the largest individual shareholder and second largest shareholder held a stake of 7.51% representing 18,120,000 shares.



Analysis

CAL Bank began the year, 2011 with a share price of 0.33p (04/JAN/2011) and because of investor activities & active trades, share price of the bank rose to 0.39p (04/FEB/2011). Meanwhile, the stock price dropped steadily after that time to close at 0.26p on 22/March/ 2011. Further fluctuation of price was recorded from July to October 2011. Ten months down the year, CAL recorded a Year high of 0.39 pesewas and Year-Low of  0.25 pesewas (p). The volume of trade heightened at the end of October and hence was reflected by an increased in share price by some pesewas.
CAL stock and other financial stocks performed badly in November making the Financial Stock Index remain lower than the Base index of 1000.

The Year 2011 obviously was not the best year for most stocks on the GSE and CAL Bank is no exception.

I would be writing on Ecobank Ghana Limited (EBG) in my next post. I would be reviewing EBG stock on the Ghana Stock Exchange for the Year 2011.

[Courtesy: Ghana Stock Exchange, Bloomberg]

Analyzing the Wealth of Steve Jobs from US$1500 to US$8.3 billion

From a humble beginning, Steve Jobs started Apple with Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula. Jobs invested his Volkswagen bus valued at $1,500 and Wozniak invested his calculator, valued at US$250.

From the investment of US$1,500, Steve Jobs became every body’s hero and a billion in America. But before then, he ‘stayed hungry and stayed foolish’. When Apple began to expand, the company looked for an experienced executive to help manage its expansion. So many people came on Board as well as investors. Steve Job lured Sculley John in to Apple away from Pepsi- Cola by asking him whether he would like to sell sugar water for the rest of his life or join him to change the world.  Whiles most of Jobs’ employee thought he was too temperamental, he stood by his principles and gets the job done at all times.

An internal power struggle at Apple and redundancies at the time made Sculley relieved Jobs of his duties. The Co-founder was fired.  To Steve, "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."

Jobs owned 7.5 million shares when they went public and with an IPO price of $22 per share that makes his $1,500 investment in 1976 worth $217 million in 1980.

Steve Jobs left Apple to start NeXT Computer in 1985 with $7 million and when things were going bad, the Billionaire Ross Perot invested a lot of money in the company.

Steve later bought The Graphic Group (Pixar) for $10 million of which $5 million was given as capital. After some time, Jobs announced that Disney had agreed to buy Pixar which was worth about 7.4 billion. This transaction made him the largest individual shareholder with about 7% stock holdings in the company. The sale of Pixar to Disney brought the largest impact to his net worth valued at above $7 billion today.  Along with the sale of Pixar, Jobs gained a seat on the Disney board and increased his net worth to more than $5.1 billion from a worth of 4.3 billion representing 138 million shares in Disney.

Apple Inc. bought NeXT Computers for US$429 million in 1996 and that was how Steve Jobs came back to his company. At the 2000 Macworld Expo, Jobs became the permanent CEO of Apple Inc. but in August 2011, Jobs resigned as CEO, but remained at the company as chairman of the company's board and director on Disney board.

Money is not the key motivator for Steve Jobs but he died a Billionaire (has a net worth of $8.3 billion as of March 2011), a great contributor to the American Capital market and an inspiration to young entrepreneurs or business owners.

Courtesy: Market Watch, Wikipedia, Investopedia, Forbes and Apple Inc.