Shareholders of Malawi Stock Exchange listed Mpico have challenged the company’s board of directors to consider making investments in the Mining and tourism sectors and be enterprising in solving persistent accommodation challenges in urban center in order to grow the business.
This came out during a stakeholder engagement meeting on Tuesday in Blantyre.
Among other things, the shareholders were irked by failure by the company to increase the occupancy rate of some of its properties, especially the gate way mall in Lilongwe, and stagnation of rental incomes in 2023.
One of the shareholders, Brian Kampanje said the management and the board must be vigilant.
“The way to go is to partner with other people to build state-of-art modern buildings, purpose-built for specific functions, like other investors have suggested that maybe they should think of amusement parks, they should be thinking about townhouses.
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“People must live in the modern world, must live toward what the customers want today. So, people, I believe, have taken note of whatever the investors are bringing down, bringing up, and they will strategize and incorporate what the investors want,” Kampanje said. He added that investors want capital gains and increase in dividend payout and therefore hope that whatever they will implement will be beneficial to the investor.
One of the company’s directors Vera Zulu said suggestions by the shareholders were essential to inform the company’s plan of action moving forward.
“We do have engagements such as this one to get additional ideas into the court so that we can now go and do a detailed review and feasibility study to see is this idea with which will it give back to the shareholder, the retained that the shareholder deserves.
“So that’s what we are going to do. Take all the ideas, put them aside and review one by one. The ones that will make sense for the shareholder is the one that will get implemented but we have received a lot of good ideas especially the direct investments into the tourism sector and the mining sector and the retail sector those are key inputs that have come through today,” Zulu said.
