尼日利亚丹格特炼油厂IPO获11亿融资，拟创非洲最大上市纪录

I think that telling Africans that they're not going to succeed in manufacturing is very dangerous and very bad advice. I absolutely think that they can succeed in manufacturing and in the places that I've seen, the manufacturing, they seem to be doing fine. I don't buy into the idea that there's been a change, or there is an ongoing change now based around robotics and AI. That means that there will be no manufacturing development in Africa.

You're right that some cheap inputs from from China have been helpful to developments in Africa. But the thing I would emphasize much more than that, that's come from China is large amounts of manufacturing, investment. So if you look at the FT's micro database of FDI for last year, China put $12.5 billion into manufacturing investment, in Africa. And if you then dig into like why are they doing that? The the answer is usually because they can get better margins.

Manufacturing in Africa. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. -And I'm Tracy Alloway. I don't know what it is Tracy. I kind of have this urge to do a Africa trip Like, I sort of want to go to this some of these capitals Lagos, Accra, Kigali and so forth. Like, I don't know, I'm like, I've never been there. And now I'm like, I'm kind of curious. Well, you know, the urge to explore Africa is well documented among, the history of, of men, of white men in particular.

So, so really, you're just following your instinct here? That's right. Yeah. I've been to Africa, various places. Morocco, Egypt, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, briefly. I have some insane stories I could tell you. But probably the one thing that stands out to me is the diversity of that particular continent. Obviously. So Egypt is very, very different to a place totally like Mozambique. And I will say, you know, like I saw some, some a lot of development in places like South Africa, Egypt, to some extent, Mozambique was one of the poorest places I've ever seen in my life, to the point where a lot of people don't even want money.

They would just barter for goods like an extra T-shirt in your luggage or something like that. It is pretty extraordinary, just generally, you know, I think there is if you had gone back 50 years ago or something like that, you would have had this view that, you know, countries around the world over time converge economically, particularly in a world of free trade. The factories chase, the countries, they'd have the cheapest labor, etc. and therefore everyone in a world of free trade, you get this sort of like broad growth and wealth, but the extremes, you know, of outcomes over the last several decades has been, truly extraordinary.

Absolutely. So you have places like Nigeria, like Lagos, I think you mentioned, which seems to some extent be booming at the moment with higher oil prices. You have a very, very big IPO coming down the line. Yeah. So this is what, I'm particularly interested in. We had a I met a listener, a producer want me to dox him when we were in London a couple of years ago, and he's like, oh, you guys really have to do an episode on this new oil refinery that's being that's being built in Nigeria.

We. And anyway, this is for him. I hope he's listening at this point because it took two years. But we're doing we're doing it because we there's the news today that Dangote refinery or sorry the news this week we were recording this August 20th came out earlier in the week that they had secured $400 million ahead of a planned IPO, that there is 1.1 billion and backing from a few other firms, and also that the founder of this company, he's also, I believe, you know, he's one of the richest people in the world.

And I don't think Dangote is anywhere close to being a household name. No. And it's going to be the biggest stock market listing in African history ever. So we should definitely talk about it. And I think it's good to talk about it in the context of why development in Africa has or hasn't happened in certain cases. Absolutely. Well, I'm very excited to say we really do have the perfect guest, someone we've never talked to on the podcast before, but it was probably an error because someone who's out writing and thinking has been very influential to people of our cohort over the last several years who are interested in things like industrial policy and so forth.

We are going to be speaking with Joe Studwell, senior fellow at the Africa Urban Lab, senior visiting fellow at ODI Global and the author of the recent book How Africa Works. And of course, many readers, may have read his previous book How Asia Works, talking about how some of these East Asian economies got as wealthy as they did. So Joe, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Well, thank you for having me. Let's start with the simple question.

What is this company? Dangote. And who is the founder. So Lee leaker Dangote is from Kano in the north of Nigeria. He's a muslim trader, archetypal Muslim trader. He grew up trading soft commodities. Got a substantial business doing that. And then he went, under the presidency of Obasanjo, to the government and negotiated a deal where he'd get four years of protection, as a monopoly importer of cement, which was not then made in Nigeria in return for creating, local cement production.

And he did that, but not only did he do that, he went on to do it across Africa. He's in a dozen countries doing cement now, and he's beaten, in most places. The multinational cement producers like the, the Swiss, Holcim and whatever, who, who did who previously dominated the business. So he that was the first thing that he did that people really kind of sat up and said, wow, this guy has got something. And then he decided he'd do something much bigger and he decided he would, build a, an oil refinery in a country where a couple of times previously government had tried to, to, to develop refining capacity.

And it was just a disaster, an industrial policy disaster. Dangote did it. He spent $20 billion. It's east of Lagos, a huge, huge plant. And it worked. It is working. And not only that, he's expanding it, now. So in the course of doing that, he became, the richest guy in Africa. But he doesn't, stop because he's developed such capability in terms of project management and project delivery, that he just goes on to other things.

So, next to his, oil refinery is a very large urea plant fertilizer plant, which is now supplying the majority of fertilizer consumed in Nigeria. And he's, recently signed up, to do the same thing in, in Ethiopia, the second most populous African country after Nigeria. And yeah, he just keeps, rolling forward. And so this listing, I think will be, will be pretty heavily oversubscribed because it's investor access to the first real quality, listed industrial asset pack.

And on the continent where I have a this is just, a sort of tangential question, but you mentioned that he was first in cement production. Why does cement production seem to be such a thing in developing nations in particular, such that if you go to a place like Nigeria or like Myanmar, you will see a lot of ads for different cement brands and it feels like everyone is producing cement. Yeah. Because it's so fundamental to development.

I mean, development is about investment, construction, creation of physical assets. And so cement is just absolutely fundamental. What is the Dangote, for example, actually say about, I guess, the diversification prospects for Africa? Because when I think, okay, it's a petroleum refinery that, you know, urea production that's kind of industrialized, but it's also very connected to resources. Right. And we've all heard about the resource curse.

We know that various African nations have experienced it to some extent throughout time. So how much of this is actually an an industrial success story versus like, kind of more of the same? I would say it's different to what we saw in the past i