Companies love to headline "earnings per share" — but a single number that tells you how much profit belongs to one share can't, by itself, tell you whether that share is worth buying.
Open any news story about a company's results and you'll see it: "EPS came in at X." Earnings per share (EPS) is just the company's total profit divided by the number of shares that exist, so you can talk about profit "per share" instead of profit for the whole company.
EPS = Profit for the year ÷ Number of shares outstanding. It answers: "if you owned exactly one share, how much of this year's profit is notionally yours?"
You don't need to divide anything yourself here — both Safaricom and Equity Group publish EPS directly in their financial statements, already calculated for you.
Here are both companies' basic EPS figures, straight from their audited results.
| KShs | FY2024 | FY2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Basic EPS (KShs/share) | 1.6 | 1.6 |
Source: Safaricom PLC Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024, p.177 (figures simplified/grouped for this lesson; audited, currency KShs millions).
| KShs | FY2024 | FY2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Basic & diluted EPS (Group) | 12.34 | 11.12 |
Source: Equity Group Holdings PLC Audited Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31 December 2024 (audited; currency KShs '000, EPS in KShs per share).
Two very different numbers — 1.6 versus 12.34 — for two profitable companies. Before you conclude anything from that difference, read on.
It's tempting to look at 12.34 and 1.6 and think Equity Group is roughly eight times more profitable, per share, than Safaricom. That comparison doesn't actually work, and here's why: EPS depends on how many shares the company has split its profit across, and that share count is essentially arbitrary. A company can double its number of shares outstanding overnight (a "stock split") and its EPS would instantly halve — with absolutely nothing about the underlying business changing.
Safaricom's FY2024 basic EPS was KShs 1.6 per share. But by mid-2026, Safaricom's share price is quoted around KShs 35.95 — and a stock split happened after FY2024. That means the FY2024 EPS of 1.6 and today's share count aren't measuring the same thing anymore. If you ever try to combine an old EPS figure with a current share price (we'll do exactly this in Lesson 16, on the P/E ratio), you have to check whether a split happened in between — otherwise you'll compare two numbers that were never on the same footing.
The same logic applies across companies, not just across time. Safaricom and Equity Group each chose their own share count when they structured their business — one isn't "right" and the other "wrong." So EPS of 1.6 versus EPS of 12.34 mostly reflects each company's own share-count history, not which company is more profitable or better run.
EPS isn't useless — it's just narrower than it sounds. Two things it's genuinely good for:
EPS on its own tells you how a company's own profit-per-share is trending over time — it does not tell you whether one company's shares are a better deal than another's, and it never tells you anything about the share price. For that, you need one more piece of information, which is where Lesson 16 picks up.
Next lesson, we'll take the EPS figures from today and divide the share price by them to get the P/E ratio — the single most commonly quoted number for judging whether a share price is cheap or expensive relative to a company's earnings, complete with the staleness caveat this lesson just set up.
Primary source for this lesson's numbers: Safaricom PLC Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024.
Something unclear, or want to dig into a line item we skipped (like "why diluted EPS can differ from basic EPS")? Ask your teacher — that's what these sessions are for.