Monday Breakfast Stories and more from the StockMarket.et desk.
Good morning! Two numbers frame this week, and they are almost the same size. The first is 126.9 billion birr. That is what Ethio telecom’s plan puts on the table for the 2026/27 fiscal year: 83.8 billion in direct and indirect taxes, and 43.1 billion in dividends. The tax goes to the treasury. The dividend
Good morning! Somebody has to go without. That is the sentence underneath almost every story this week. The state power producer looked at the water coming into its dams, decided a dry period was on the way, and cut its single largest revenue-generating customer by 75 percent before the shortage arrived. The central bank sold
Good morning! There is a number under almost every story this week, and it is a price. The central bank sold half a billion dollars in a single sitting to pull the birr back from a record low, and the market read the size, not the signal. Inflation answered with 15.3 percent. Official creditors blessed
Good morning! Here is the week in one number. Ten companies paid 254.44 billion birr in tax last fiscal year. That is 48.71 percent of everything Ethiopia’s Large Taxpayers Branch Office collected, from ten names out of 746 on its books. Ethio Telecom alone paid more than every bank and insurance company in the country
Good morning! The Ethiopian Securities Exchange changed chief executives on Friday. Tilahun Esmael Kassahun (PhD), who carried the exchange from a project office in 2022 to a working securities market in January 2025, is out. Yodit Kassa, who joined in late 2023 and worked her way from Chief Business Development Officer to Chief Operating Officer,
Good morning! A former World Bank president spent this week arguing, in a World Bank working paper, that Ethiopia’s currency float made the poor poorer and handed the winnings to banks and well-connected firms. It is a contested claim, and a minority one inside the institutions that backed the reform. But the rest of the
Good morning! If there is one question stitching this week together, it is a simple one: who gets let in, and on what terms. The central bank drew a calendar around the dollar and slammed a door on virtual assets. Three fintechs opened a credit line to borrowers no bank would touch, a coffee platform
Good morning! For nearly three years, Ethiopian banks lived with a ceiling over their heads and a net beneath the economy. Last week, both came down. The National Bank of Ethiopia scrapped the credit growth cap entirely, raised its policy rate for the first time, and handed the job of managing money to markets. A
Good morning. Pour the buna. The Ethiopian fiscal year ended last week, and the numbers came in like report cards nobody wanted to hide. Record exports. Record FDI. Record budget. Record premiums, record profits, record payment volumes. And while the government was closing the books on 2025/26, the Ethiopian Securities Exchange was quietly opening new
Good morning. Pour the buna. The exchange opened this morning with five equities on the board for the first time. That alone is worth noting before anything else. Then the rest of the week’s news: Ethiopia made real progress on its debt. Not a final settlement, not a clean slate, but a direction the market
Good morning. Pour the buna. If last week was about a number, a billion birr cleared in a single week, this week was about a question that sits underneath every number: where is the money going to come from? And the answer Ethiopia gave, over and over, in announcement after announcement, was the same. From
Good morning. Pour the buna. The numbers this week pulled in two directions at once, which is becoming the signature of this moment. On the trading floor, Ethiopia’s capital market crossed a line it has been walking toward for two years. On the kitchen table, the cost of putting protein on a plate kept climbing.
Monday Breakfast Stories lands every week — the capital market, banking, and startup news that moved.
