EFFECT OF FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT STRATEGY ON MARKET VALUE OF QUOTED ICT BUSINESSES IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The number of listed ICT firms and market value of their shares is abysmally low in Nigeria, even with the current rapid global and local development in the sector. The increasing number of ICT companies and technological firms with huge market opportunities has not yielded the deserved economic impact. This study is borne out of the rapid development of ICT sector globally and in Nigeria specifically, also the divergent opinion and theories in existence relating to Financial leverage (FL) and Liquidity rate (LR) and its effect on stock market behavior towards Share price of a company elicited interest for this study. This academic work is will investigate effect of Financial management strategies such as financing and liquidity policies on market value of quoted ICT businesses in Nigeria. Retrospective research design was adopted for this study and the sample included all the (10) ten listed ICT firm in Nigeria between 2013 to 2022 (10 years). The study employed secondary data using descriptive statistics and regression analysis technique to conduct empirical analysis in order to ascertain of the connection between the dependent variable which is Market value proxy by Market price per share (MPPS) and independent variable which is Financial management strategies proxy by Financial leverage (FL) and Liquidity rate (LR), control variable is Firm size proxy by SZ. It was revealed that FL has negative insignificant effect on MPPS, LR has a positive and insignificant effect on MPPS. The study concluded that firms with higher financial leverage tend to have slightly lower market prices per share, while firms with higher liquidity rates tend to have higher market prices per share. It was suggested that government should encourage a large numbers of unlisted ICT firms to be listed in the stock market and also facilitate loans at lower rate to support the development of the industry and the economy in general.