BUSINESS ROUNDUP: Cooking gas prices drop; CBN sets new transaction limits; other stories

Hello, and welcome to the Business Roundup this week. Here, we bring you highlights of events that happened during the week -from the capital market to the mainstream business activities, while not forgetting the tech/economy build-up.

Here are the Headlines:

• Railway debt service rises amid N1.31bn decline in revenue
• PoS agents in Lagos increase charges for withdrawal, transfer
• Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic charges customers $450,000 for space trip
• Cooking gas prices drop, highest in North-Central states, lowest in S’East
• CBN sets new transaction limits on contactless payments

Summary:

Railway-related debt service costs the Federal Government $62.66 million in the first quarter of this year.

Data obtained from the Debt Management Office (DMO) by Ripples Nigeria on Saturday revealed that the amount was used to service debt on the Nigeria Railway Modernisation Project (Idu-Kaduna Section), Nigeria Railway Modernisation Project (Lagos-Ibadan Section) and the Nigeria Abuja Light Rail Project.

A breakdown of the figure showed that the Nigeria Railway Modernisation Project (Idu-Kaduna Section) gulped $23.1 million.

Residents of Lagos State will soon start to pay more for withdrawal and transfer of money through Point of Sale {PoS}, the Lagos State chapter of the Association of Mobile Money and Bank Agents in Nigeria has resolved to charge customers N500 for N10,000 cash withdrawals.

The Public Relations Officer of AMMBAN in Lagos, Stephen Adeoye, announced the new charges while speaking on Channels Television on Friday.

According to him, the association’s price list is to eradicate price discrepancies in the industry.

Virgin Galactic, a spaceship owned by Richard Branson, has made its first commercial flight into space and charged passengers between $200,000 and $450,000 each.

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The first journey into space, a trip of 50 miles from the Earth, was conducted on Thursday after Virgin Galactic twin-fuselage “mothership” aircraft left the Spaceport America, New Mexico, at 8:30 am local time and returned by 4:45 p.m.

The mothership, after gaining high altitude, had released VSS Unity, a rocket-powered plane that conveyed six crew members on a 90-minute flight out of Earth.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has set new transaction limits on contactless payments after issuing guidelines for commercial banks and other financial institutions to adopt.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the CBN said contactless payments are now limited to N15,000 per transaction, but the daily cumulative limit is limited to N50,000.

Contactless payments are transactions done without physical contact with devices. Pre-paid, debit and credit cards, tokens, mobile electronic devices, stickers, fobs and wearable devices can be used for contactless payments.

The average retail price for refilling a 5kg Cylinder of Liquefied Petroleum Gas, better known as Cooking Gas, dropped to N4,360.69 in May 2023.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) disclosed this in its Liquefied Petroleum Gas (Cooking Gas) Price Watch for May released on Tuesday.

According to the NBS, the price of refilling a 5kg cylinder depreciated by 6.07 percent on a month-on-month basis from N4,642.27 recorded in April 2023 to N4,360.69 last month.

NSE ROUNDUP: PZ, Transcorp Hotels, others lift Nigeria’s capital market by N467.9bn

The equity capitalization in the Nigerian capital market rose by 1.42 percent at the close of trading on Friday.

This represented a N467.95 billion growth in the value of investments from N32.72 trillion to N33.19 trillion after five hours of business in the capital market.

Recall that the stock market did not open on Wednesday and Thursday because of the Eid-el-Kabir holiday.

On the tech scene, Messenger, Peach Motors, Trella, Twitter, Jada, GrEEK, Haul247, Creditchek, Maltento, JP Morgan, Brookfield Asset Management, and byanat were some of the names that made the headlines in the tech ecosystem this week.

Creditchek, a Nigerian fintech startup, has launched to help lenders across Africa assess credit risks by providing reliable verification of potential consumers’ creditworthiness.

Also, Nigeria’s Haul247, a logistics tech platform that connects businesses with haulage and warehousing services, has announced securing a $3 million in seed funding.

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