Dangote Sugar, 28% below its high, trades at 493x. Is it cheap?

Dangote Sugar Refinery Plc stock closed at N69 as of August 28, 2026, about 28% below its 52-week high of N95.80. For some stocks, a decline of that size leaves them cheaper

At N69 per share and trailing earnings per share of just N0.14; investors are paying about 493 times what the company earned over the last 12 months. In simple terms, investors are paying N493 for every N1 of earnings, and that ordinarily sounds expensive

Typically, a stock is considered expensive when investors are paying a high price relative to what the company earns.

Although a high P/E does not automatically mean a stock is a bad investment. Investors may be willing to pay a high multiple because they expect the company’s earnings to grow rapidly in the future. Similarly, a stock that has fallen sharply can still appear expensive if its current earnings have fallen even faster.

For Dangote Sugar, the share price has fallen 28% from its high, but its trailing earnings are also depressed by the losses recorded in previous years.

To understand why, we need to look at what happened to the business. After making profits of N22.1 billion in 2021 and N54.7 billion in 2022, Dangote Sugar slipped into losses in 2023, 2024 and 2025, accumulating about N330 billion in losses over the three years.

The losses, however, were not simply because the company could no longer make money from selling sugar.

In 2023, for example, Dangote Sugar still generated N72.7 billion in operating profit. The problem was what happened after that: net finance costs reached N191.1 billion, largely because of foreign exchange losses. This overwhelmed the profit generated by the underlying business.

The pressure continued into 2024, when the company recorded a N192.6 billion loss, before narrowing the loss to N64.1 billion in 2025. But even in 2025, the underlying…