Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

President of Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, plans a stock market listing for his Nigerian crude oil refinery by the end of next year to widen the company’s investor base, a Bloomberg report said yesterday.

The billionaire also plans this year to list the group’s urea plant, which has a capacity to produce 2.8 million tons of the crop nutrient per annum, Dangote told the African Export-Import Bank’s annual general meeting in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja.

The oil facility can process 650,000 barrels of crude a day, making it the continent’s biggest refinery.

A listing — through an initial public offering — could help woo investors including state-owned pension funds, the Bloomberg report added.

The $20 billion Dangote Refinery outside the commercial hub Lagos, which became operational last year, currently produces aviation fuel, naphtha, diesel and gasoline.

It’s “important to list the refinery so that people will not be calling us a monopoly,” Dangote said. “They will now say we have shares, so let everybody have a part of it,” he added.

The tycoon, who had planned to start construction of a 5,000 ton steel plant after completing the refinery, last year scrapped the proposal because of the allegations of monopoly.

Dangote earlier this year said his group was on track to generate a total revenue of $30 billion in 2026. Yesterday, he said that the company plans to surpass Qatar as the world’s biggest exporter of urea within four years. The facility currently exports 37 per cent of its output to the US.

Besides, Dangote pledged that Africa will be self-sufficient in fertiliser within 40 months, especially on the basis of a planned expansion of his $2.5 billion plant on the outskirts of Lagos.

Africa currently imports over six million metric tons of fertiliser annually as it struggles to produce enough food in often challenging growing conditions.
The benefits of increasing domestic production would include reduced foreign exchange expenditure, which has been a major economic burden in Nigeria because of the weakness of the local currency, Reuters reported.

“In the next 40 months, Africa will not import fertiliser from anywhere. We have a very aggressive trajectory right now. We want to put Dangote to be the highest producer of urea, bigger and higher than Qatar – give me 40 months,” Dangote said at the meeting.

Dangote runs Africa’s largest granulated urea complex, which has an annual capacity of 3 million tons, 37 per cent of which it exports to the United States. It will need to double current output to achieve his ambition. Dangote has said he is not worried about the impact of Trump tariffs.

Analysts say the market outlook for fertiliser is bullish, but there are also challenges and the kind of expansion Dangote seeks requires infrastructure to be built, the Reuters report added.

“Any new fertiliser plant or expansion project faces cost overrun risks to the producer,” Senior Equity Analyst at Morningstar Research, Seth Goldstein said.
Also, an analyst at global risk consultancy, Control Risk, Mikolah Judson, cited the need for “transport infrastructure and port capacity,” saying “bottlenecks routinely delay various import and export projects in Nigeria”.

Dangote has a track record for delivering big projects. He also owns the Dangote Petroleum Refinery, Africa’s largest, although its launch was repeatedly delayed and it exceeded its initial budget.