culled from BusinessDay: http://www.businessdayonline.com/NG/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15745:south-west-gets-73-of-bank-loans-in-nigeria&catid=76:hot-topic&Itemid=564

Abuja & North-West 5.7% •South-South 4.58% •South-East 2.1% •African countries 3% •North-West less than 1 % •Europe 6%

Businesses located in the South-West of Nigeria, including Lagos, consume 73 percent of all bank lending done in the country. This has been revealed by the Nigerian Banks Financial Transparency Report 2010, a report jointly published by BusinessDay and Source Capital, a Nigerian-based financial research firm.

The report is based on the analysis of the annual financial reports by the 14 listed banks that have made their annual reports public. The banks are Access Bank, Diamond Bank, Ecobank, Fidelity Bank, First Bank, FCMB, GTBank, Skye Bank, Stanbic IBTC, Sterling Bank, UBA, Unity Bank, Wema Bank and Zenith Bank.

It shows that the South-West dominates in the loan portfolio of all the banks, except Unity bank whose loan portfolio is dominated by the North-West, including Abuja.

According to the report, the 14 banks had a total loan portfolio of N6.16 trillion in 2009. Of this amount, businesses located in the South-West of the country were allocated N4.52 trillion or 73 percent of the total loans portfolio. Abuja and North-West ranked a distant second in terms of bank loan portfolios allocation with just about 5.7 percent or N350 billion of bank loans going to that part of the country.

Interestingly, the report revealed that aggregate loans to Europe ranked third at 6 per cent. Loans to other African countries amounted to 3 percent. The South-South part of Nigeria ranked fourth attracting 4.58 percent or N282 billion of total bank loans in the country in 2009, while the South-East attracted just about 2.1 percent of bank loans in the country.

The South-West dominated the loan books of all the 14 banks except Unity Bank whose loan book was dominated by loans given to businesses (including government) located in Abuja and the North-West. Unity Bank had 60 percent of its loan portfolio in Abuja and the North West and 23 percent in the South-West.

Wema Bank, which just applied for regional banking license to operate in the South-West has 88 percent of its loan portfolio allocated to businesses in that region. But FCMB has the highest concentration of its loan book to the South-West with 95 percent of loan portfolio given to businesses in the area. Fidelity Bank has 92 percent of its loan portfolio concentrated in the South-West, while Skye Bank has 90 percent of lending in the same area.

The South-East gets an average of 2.0 percent of bank lending while the North-East attracts less than one percent.