Harare- Zambian Breweries PLC, the Lusaka-listed brewing giant and Zambia's dominant producer of lager, stout, and cider whose portfolio spans flagship brands including Mosi, Castle Lager, and Carling Black Label under its AB InBev-affiliated operating structure, expects earnings per share for the year ended 31 December 2025 to increase by 144% compared to the prior year.

This comes after the company executed a well-calibrated pricing strategy through 2025 that protected volumes while sustaining revenue momentum, supported by focused sales and marketing investment and production cost growth deliberately held below the prevailing rate of inflation.

A 144% increase in earnings per share is a substantial result by any measure, and the language of the trading statement gives a clear picture of how it was achieved. The reference to a pricing strategy that protected volumes while sustaining revenue is the key phrase.

 In a market like Zambia, where consumer purchasing power has been under pressure from sustained inflation and the kwacha's depreciation against major currencies over recent years, protecting volumes at higher prices requires both brand strength and commercial sophistication. A brewer that raises prices without managing the volume consequence ends up with higher revenue per unit but lower total sales, which can be margin-dilutive at the operating level.

Zambrew's statement signals that it managed both simultaneously, delivering revenue growth that was sufficient to drive the earnings improvement without sacrificing the volume base that keeps fixed-cost absorption strong.

The specific reference to production cost growth contained below inflation is equally significant. Zambia's manufacturing sector has faced input cost pressures from energy prices, imported raw material costs denominated in hard currency, and general wage inflation. A brewer that can hold production cost growth below the prevailing inflation rate in that environment is either benefiting from significant efficiency improvements, favourable procurement arrangements, or both.

In the context of a 144% EPS increase, the implication is that the operating leverage of the business, the benefit of revenue growing faster than costs, produced a substantial expansion in absolute profit that flowed through to shareholders. The result positions Zambrew as one of the more compelling earnings recovery stories on the Lusaka Securities Exchange in 2025, and sets a high base against which the 2026 performance will be measured.

In similar developments, Real Estate Investments Zambia, the only dedicated listed real estate investment vehicle on the Lusaka Securities Exchange and a company whose portfolio spans commercial, retail, and industrial property assets across Zambia's key urban centres, expects basic earnings per share for the year ended 31 December 2025 to be 50% lower than the prior year.

This comes after a year in which the company's distributable income, the cash actually generated by its property portfolio and available for distribution to shareholders, increased by over 100%, with dividends payable expected to double relative to 2024. Both statements are true simultaneously, and understanding how requires separating the accounting result from the operational one.

The divergence between a 50% decline in earnings per share and a doubling of distributable income is almost certainly explained by a non-cash fair value movement on investment properties.

REIZ, as a listed real estate investment company, holds a portfolio of investment properties that are required under International Financial Reporting Standards to be measured at fair value at each reporting date. Changes in that fair value flow directly through the income statement and into reported earnings per share. In a year where property valuations appreciated strongly, as was the case in 2024 driven by kwacha depreciation inflating USD-denominated asset values in local currency terms, reported earnings were supported by a significant non-cash gain.

In 2025, as the kwacha stabilised and the valuation uplift moderated or partially reversed, the fair value contribution to reported earnings contracted, producing the 50% decline in EPS that the trading statement discloses. This is the same dynamic that drove profit declines at ZAFFICO and Zambia Re in the same reporting period, both of which recorded lower reported profits driven by smaller fair value gains while their underlying operational performance improved.

The distributable income figure is the more commercially meaningful number for a REIT-structured vehicle. Distributable income excludes non-cash items, including fair value movements, and represents the actual cash generated by the property portfolio available for distribution to shareholders.

A 100% increase in distributable income means the rental cash flows, occupancy levels, and net property income of the REIZ portfolio approximately doubled in 2025 compared to 2024. That is a genuinely strong operational result, and the decision to pass that through to shareholders in full through a doubling of the dividend reflects a board confident in the sustainability of that income base.

What drove the distributable income doubling is the key question the full results will need to answer. The possible drivers include new property acquisitions completed during 2025 that added rental income to the portfolio, improved occupancy across existing assets as Zambia's commercial property market absorbed the post-restructuring recovery, rental escalations in a market where USD-denominated leases have benefited from the stronger dollar environment, or a combination of all three.

The scale of the increase, a doubling in a single year, is large enough to suggest that new acquisitions or a significant improvement in occupancy rather than rental escalation alone is the primary driver. That distinction matters for the sustainability of the income base and for how investors should value the stock going forward.

Taken together, the Zambrew and REIZ trading statements offer a useful snapshot of the Lusaka Securities Exchange's current character. Both companies are reporting strong underlying operational performance. Both are delivering shareholder value through dividend growth or earnings expansion. And both are issuing results in a market environment where the macroeconomic stabilisation that followed Zambia's debt restructuring is beginning to produce the corporate earnings recovery that analysts had projected but that took longer to materialise than expected.

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