‘Dangote Group market cap to hit $60b by 2015’

The President of the Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, has said his group of companies will be worth $60 billion by 2015.

At the moment, the group is worth $32 billion.

He also called for the liberalisation of foreign exchange for importers to reduce pressure on the foreign exchange market.

Dangote, who spoke yesterday in Lagos at the presentation of the Batches One and Two students of the newly established Dangote Academy, said: “We are working towards making Dangote the biggest conglomerate in Africa. Now that we are training youths in this Academy, we are targeting that by 2015, Dangote will have $60 billion market capitalisation. When you look at the equivalent, the total reserve of Nigeria is about $35 billion, by the next four years. Our own market capitalisation should be somewhere around twice the reserve of Nigeria, and that means in the cement side, by this time 2014,we should be producing more than 50 million metric tonnes in more that 14 countries excluding Nigeria. And in sugar, we are trying to do the same thing. The same thing we did in cement, we are going to replicate in sugar.”

He supported the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor in rejecting further devaluation of the Naira, saying such devaluation will have negative effect on the economy.

“We are not an export nation. We import quite a lot of what we are using today. And if we devalue our currency, it will have quite a lot of effect. By just devaluing, everybody will increase his price. Even somebody, who is producing local products such as boli and co(roasted plantain) will tell you they are doing devaluation. So, we have to be very careful. I even support the Governor of Central Bank that devaluation today is not the best of reasoning.”

On what informed the Dangote Academy in which fresh polytechnic graduates are trained in different areas for one year, and, thereafter, given jobs placement in Dangote companies, Dangote said there are different sorts of business actualists “which we really lack in Nigeria, if we really want to have these dream actualised by 2020, we need to establish people who can actually drive this jobs, and the only ones who can drive the jobs are the youths who would be very interested as they know what they are doing.”

Explaining how the beneficiaries of the one year free training were selected, Dangote said:

“We selected 600 people and out of this, we picked the 120, we are still going to get 15 ladies more to make it 135. The selection cut across the six geo-political zones, so that everybody will now benefit from the programme.”

He promised to give N500,000 each as a prize to build on for the first 10 best students before they move on. “The way we are going, if all of them perform well, we don’t mind retaining them, but the thinking is that the minimum we should retain is 35 per cent. If we don’t have employment for them, we will try and get employment for them in other areas such as Nestle, PZ, and so on our own target by 2015, we should have a company that is worth $60 billion in terms of market capitalisation. We think in the next five years, we will be among one of the best 1000 companies in the world.”

He listed some challenges facing industrialists in Nigeria to include changes of policy by government, infrastructure in terms of power.

He, however, added that power should not be an excuse for non-performance of companies.

“Power should not be an excuse before the government sorts out the power issue, you should also try and do your own. In most of our own companies, we generate our power, so it is not really an excuse. We need to also look at long-term funds and interest rates. Interest rates are getting a bit high, even though the current governor of CBN has done very well, by providing about N500 billion, which has never been done before. Now, if you want to generate your own power, or even if you have your own power, you can go and re-finance by borrowing money for 15 years, which we have never seen before at seven per cent. At seven per cent, you cannot complain.”

Source : The Nation