Page 12 - Learn Africa 2021 Annual Report

Learn Africa Plc
Chairman’s Statement (cont’d)

Operating result
In the year ended 31 March 2021, results of our Company’s operations showed that the Company
posted a turnover of $2.39 billion, a decrease of 16% from $2.87 billion posted in 2020. The Company
also posted a profit before tax of $282.08 million and an operating profit of $161.08 million after
accruing $121million as taxes.

Dividend payment
The Board of Directors has recommended for your consideration and approval at this meeting a
dividend of 15 kobo for each 50 kobo ordinary share. This translates to $115.7 million which is
subject to the appropriate statutory deductions.

Expansion of products portfolio
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, you may recall that in my last report, I also spoke about our
new investments in the development of the e-learning component of our business. I am elated to
report at this meeting that we have now developed an App for the deployment of our e-contents. The
App, known as Learn Africa eReader, combines both offline and online functionalities and it is now
available for download on the Google Play Store for Android and Apple devices. We are also making
remarkable progress on the complete digitisation of our content, conversion of our key titles into
videos, and animation of our nursery titles.

We are excited about our growing capacity to take advantage of sales opportunities for the electronic
formats of our products with the hope that they would make significant contributions to our turnover
and profit in the near future.

We have also collaborated with our partners to produce two excellent dictionaries that have been
released into the Nigerian market namely, Learn Africa Student’s English Dictionary; suitable for
intermediate readers and Learn Africa English Dictionary; appropriate for advanced learners. We
are very optimistic that they will be a huge commercial success and will satisfy our customers’
expectations for high quality and affordable dictionaries.

Digital vision: Learning made easy across Africa
As the pandemic progressed, the world, including Africa, witnessed a sudden shift of learning from
the physical classroom to the adoption of virtual learning. It is encouraging to state that Nigerian
private and public school owners were not left out, as they had to figure out ways to keep in touch
and retain their students, when the government ordered the closure of schools in the country for more
than five months.

Driven further by the pervasive devastating school insecurity situation in Nigeria, the new reality
and positive impact of e-learning and virtual learning environments for both in-school and remote

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