Dangote Sugar

How the richest African made his fortune A native of a tribe of merchants, Nigerian Aliko Dangote started a business 38 years ago, borrowing $ 3,000 from his uncle to buy rice and sugar for resale. Now he is the richest African with a fortune of $ 15.4 billion. Dangote Group founder Aliko Dangote (Photo: Bloomberg) B4. The name Dangote is known to every inhabitant of Nigeria. Dangote Group operates in a wide variety of industries - export, import, food and industrial products, oil and gas and telecommunications development, residential real estate. In the company, Dangote combines the posts of general director and chairman of the board of directors. Aliko Dangote was born in northern Nigeria, in the northern state of Kano, to a wealthy Muslim Aghalawa family - hereditary traders who were involved in caravan transportation between the Hausa city-states and throughout West Africa. His great-grandfather, the legendary Nigerian merchant Hassan Dantata, was reputed to be one of the richest people in the region at the time of his death in 1955. Ali Dangote Sugar ko's father, Mohammed Dangote, was also involved in trade and participated in politics. After his death, little Aliko was taken up by his maternal grandfather, Sanusi Dantata. The future billionaire became interested in business as a child. “I remember when I was in elementary school, I used to buy boxes of chocolates and sell them just to make money. I was so much interested in business - even in those years, ”the All Africa portal quoted him as saying. After graduating from high school, Dangote went to study entrepreneurship at Al-Ajar University in Cairo. After graduating, he returned to Kano and opened his own business in 1978. At that time he was 21 years old. For start-up capital, Dangote turned to his uncle, who loaned him 500 thousand nairas (at that time $ 3 thousand). With this money, Aliko began to buy rice, sugar, millet, salt, cotton, vegetable oil, as well as textiles at wholesale prices, and also cement abroad, and resell it on the local market at a significant mark-up. Trade went on, Dangote paid off his debts and four years later founded two companies, which later became the basis of the Dangote Group. The businessman owes his successful promotion to the high growth rates of the Nigeria economy in the early 1970s, after oil deposits were discovered in the country. Now this does not prevent him from feeling nostalgic for the times when agriculture brought most of the country's income. “Agriculture was the driver of the economy. Most of the revenue of the Eastern region was formed due to palm production, due to cocoa - in the Western region, peanuts and cotton brought income to the Northern region. But the discovery of oil in industrial volumes turned the economy into a rent seeking, and agriculture has ceased to be the main source of revenue and foreign exchange earnings of the state, ”he explained in a lecture last month at the University. Ahmad Bello. Amid political tensions in the Middle East, easy money from oil turned into a torrent in the 1980s. “The country has been flooded with imports, there is an appetite for short-term investments instead of long-term investments in agriculture, industrial production and processing facilities. The boom in the global oil market was interspersed with sharp drops that shook the Nigerian economy over the past five decades, ”Dangote recalled. In business, Dangote at first deliberately avoided investing in the oil industry, and in the late 1990s he made a decision that he would call the best of his career years later. His company, which had previously dealt exclusively with trade, goes over to its own production. The country, where the vast majority of consumer goods were imported from abroad, suffered from a lack of its own infrastructure capable of meeting the basic needs of the majority of the population, whose number, moreover, grew from year to year, in 1992 exceeding 100 million people (in 2014 amounted to 178.5 million). It was precisely "meeting the basic needs of the population" that Dangote made the mission of his company. The Dangote Group has developed an ambitious production growth program. At first, it covered the food industry - it was planned to build four flour mills, a sugar refinery and a pasta factory in the country. Then, in 2000, the group entered the cement market, acquiring a privatized state-owned plant in Benue state, and in 2003 bought the Obajana cement plant, the largest in Central and West Afri https://jiji.ng/ojodu/meals-and-drinks/dangote-sugar-rgZz2ARDncR3gLorO3kHqhri.html