ARM Cement Ltd, East Africa’s second-biggest producer of the building material, posted a first-half loss after the depreciation of the Kenyan and Tanzanian shillings raised the cost of foreign loans.
The loss was 355.8 million Kenya shillings ($3.5 million) in the six months through June, compared with a profit of 847.2 million shillings a year earlier, the Nairobi-based company said in a statement published in the Daily Nation newspaper on Thursday. The unrealised foreign-exchange loss was 1.4 billion shillings.
The Kenyan shilling has depreciated 11% this year as foreign exchange inflows declined on falling earnings from tourism, the country’s second-biggest earner. The Tanzanian shilling has fallen 18%, the third-worst performing African currency after the Ugandan shilling and Angolan kwanza.
ARM dropped 0.7% to 70 shillings as of 11:43 a.m. in Nairobi trading, extending this year’s drop to 19%.
