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Africa’s richest man Aliko Dangote is considering plans to list shares of his Nigeria refinery business on a US stock exchange within the next four years following the launch of its initial public offering, the continent’s largest ever.
The share sale, which kicked off in Lagos on Monday, has a fundraising goal of $1.6 billion, with room to add 30% more than the target if the offer is oversubscribed. Plans for a secondary listing would extend ownership in the refinery beyond the millions of Nigerians who have swarmed onto several fintech apps to subscribe to the offer set at 40 cents a share. The refinery is valued at around $50 billion, more than twice the cost of construction.
“In the next three, four years or thereabout, we will try and also list outside the African continent, most likely in the US,” the billionaire owner of the Dangote refinery said at the IPO launch this week.
The timeframe overlaps with the company’s plans to double the refinery’s output to 1.4 million barrels a day by early 2029. In an interview last week before Dangote’s address at the IPO launch, refinery chief financial officer Bruce Tanner told Semafor that the company will “definitely be looking for international secondary listings,” and suggested that it would be after the refinery ramps up production. He had declined to give an exact date for the listing.
The company’s initial intent to roll-out this IPO on multiple African exchanges became unworkable “given the timeframe and regulatory hurdles in each of the different environments,” Tanner said. He indicated that some investment houses and pension funds that could have participated in a pan-African IPO have still bought into the offer in its current Nigeria-only form.
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The Nigerian refinery’s daily capacity of 700,000 barrels puts it above every refinery that currently operates in the US. Successfully doubling its size will make it the largest in the world, displacing India’s Jamnagar refinery owned by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani.
Expansion will enable Dangote to serve African fuel demand beyond Nigeria where it has become the most influential supplier to the domestic market since coming on stream in September 2024. The Dangote group also plans to set up a second refinery in Kenya to form a network capable of fulfilling the continent’s needs. Both projects will cost some $30 billion combined.
Proceeds from the ongoing IPO will be directed towards the Nigeria expansion and further fundraising is planned in future, Tanner said. The refinery recorded $13.9 billion in half-year revenue this year and has forecast annual increases for each full year up to 2030, on the assumption that added refining capacity will boost sales.
Meanwhile, the plant’s 69-year-old billionaire founder, whose decades-old empire includes giant cement and sugar subsidiaries, could see his wealth expand by more than 60% to $58 billion on the strength of the Nigerian refinery’s IPO alone, according to Bloomberg.
Step Back
Dangote is betting that scale, not sentiment, is what finally makes an African-founded company work as a US-listed stock. The refinery’s capacity doubling to 1.4 million barrels a day would mean the plant could produce roughly 10% of US refining capacity. At that scale, a US listing offers him dollar liquidity, index inclusion, and institutional capital the Nigerian Exchange can’t match.
But African businesses’ record on US exchanges has been shaky. African ecommerce company Jumia’s 2019 New York Stock Exchange debut showed how fast ‘African growth story’ enthusiasm evaporates even after initially hitting a record high valuation months after IPO. Today the stock still trades roughly 75% below its IPO price. Meanwhile, commodity players including Sasol, AngloGold Ashanti and Gold Fields don’t list shares directly in New York but trade as American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) — certificates issued by a US bank representing shares held abroad, letting US investors buy them in dollars without a foreign brokerage account.
But years on, their ADRs still track gold and chemical prices, not business fundamentals — proxies for commodities, not endorsements of the companies themselves. Others, including Flutterwave, have quietly shelved Nasdaq ambitions. Dangote’s bet is that hard assets, not a growth narrative, will make the difference this time.
The View From Botswana
Neo Mooki, chairperson of the stock exchange in Botswana, said at the Lagos IPO launch that the Dangote refinery’s existence and share sale was proof that “Africans can own Africa’s ambition.” She implored the company to work with her exchange “to make sure that this ambition can also be owned right across Africa from Gaborone to Nairobi.”
In addition to Kenya, Botswana’s capital market was a potential destination for the refinery’s shelved pan-African IPO. The Botswana Stock Exchange’s $70 billion equity value is smaller than Nigeria’s $120 billion market, but the bourse lists the shares of some large companies like Anglo American, the British mining giant with extensive operations in Southern Africa.
Notable
- Dangote plans to list his cement unit that is valued at $13 billion in Nigeria on the London Stock Exchange. The company will present long-term plans to investors next week in London.