Profit alerts at the the region's largest bourse have hit 11 this year after Standard Chartered Bank last week warned full-year earnings for 2015 would fall making it the second year in a row for such a number of notices.
Other companies that have issued profit alerts since beginning of the year are Uchumi Supermarkets, ARM Cement, Mumias Sugar, Car & General, East African Cables, Express Kenya, Standard Group, Sameer Africa, Atlas Development and Crown Paints.
The profit alerts make 2015 one of the toughest at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) and are blamed on factors including weak local currency, accounting fraud and increased competition.
Notices of lower earnings at the NSE were also recorded at 11 last year, compared to eight in the period to December 2013.
"We remain neutral with a bias to negative on equities given the lower earnings growth prospects for this year," says a research note by Cytonn Investments.
"The market is now purely a stock pickers' market, with few pockets of value."
Kenyan market regulator Capital Markets Authority requires companies to make the disclosures -- if earnings are projected to fall by more than 25 per cent -- to warn investors of the risks of capital losses and reduced dividend due to the profit fall.
StanChart - owned 73.89 per cent by London-based Standard Chartered plc. -- is grappling with mounting volumes of bad loans which grew by nearly a third in the quarter to September to hit Sh10.7 billion.
"There will be a redundancy charge which will impact our full year 2015 performance," the bank said in a regulatory filing announcing a profit warning.
Uchumi at the weekend sank into the red for the first time since emerging out of receivership and relisting on the Nairobi bourse in May 2011.
The fourth-placed retailer posted an after-tax loss of Sh3.4 billion in the year to June 2015 following a decline in revenue and a Sh1.04 billion write-off to cover manipulated books of account and concealed losses.
ARM Cement -- which also blends fertiliser -- slipped into the red with a Sh469 million loss in the nine months to September 2015 compared to a profit of Sh1.1 billion a year earlier, on the back of increased borrowings and margin pressures.
The cement maker has already issued a profit alert for this year, with its finance costs tripling to Sh1.1 billion in the period under review.
Troubled sugar miller Mumias nearly doubled its loss to Sh4.6 billion in the financial year ended June 2015, after sales more than halved to Sh5.5 billion following a drop in other additional revenue streams such as electricity, bottled water and ethanol.
