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Dangote Refinery Opens Africa's Largest IPO, Betting on Millions of Small Investors
Aliko Dangote has opened public subscription for his 700,000 barrel-a-day oil refinery, offering 4.1 billion shares at 525 naira each in what is set to be the biggest share sale in African history. It could raise about 1.6 billion dollars and is pitched at ordinary Nigerians who can buy in for roughly four dollars.
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The Dangote refinery lost 476 million dollars last year. However, in the first six months of this year, it earned 1.82 billion. That reversal, laid out in the prospectus for its initial public offering which Aliko Dangote is now taking to the public.
On Monday, September 14, Africa's richest man opened ownership of the Dangote Petroleum Refinery to ordinary investors, launching the largest share sale in African history. The offer put 4.1 billion ordinary shares on sale at 525 naira apiece, opening at 8 a.m. local time and running until October 13. Fully subscribed, it would raise about 2.15 trillion naira, roughly 1.6 billion dollars, and could stretch toward 2.1 billion dollars if demand runs hot and the company issues up to 30 percent more stock. By Reuters' calculation the offer values the refinery near 47 billion dollars, placing it among the largest listings the continent has seen when it starts trading on the Nigerian Exchange in November.
A Fuel Plant Sold to Ordinary Citizens
The minimum ticket is ten shares, about four dollars, and Dangote has said he wants his own drivers, cooks, and managers holding stock next to pension funds and foreign institutions. The company is chasing as many as ten million individual investors through fintech apps and digital brokerages, and dividends are set to be paid in dollars, a hedge against the sliding naira.
Nigeria has spent decades exporting crude and importing the fuel refined from it, a cycle that drained foreign currency and left pump prices at the mercy of distant refineries. Since it began operating in 2024, the Lekki plant has supplied most of the gasoline produced inside Nigeria and started shipping jet fuel across Africa and into Europe. Selling shares lets Dangote cast the listing as a national project.
A Fast Turnaround, and the Risks Beneath it
Alongside the 1.82 billion dollars of first-half net income, the refinery reported 2.60 billion dollars of core earnings on revenue of 13.91 billion dollars, running at about 84 percent of capacity. Refining margins helped, lifted by disruptions tied to the Iran conflict that raised demand for the plant's jet fuel. Those margins are already easing back toward normal, so the extraordinary half-year rested in part on extraordinary conditions. Buyers should also note that Dangote keeps a controlling majority of the company after the sale, that some subscription money appears to be rotating out of existing Nigerian shares rather than arriving fresh, and that foreign investors face a slow setup of local accounts before they can take part.
What the Listing Signals Beyond Nigeria
The refinery already ships product into Europe, which puts a plant on the West African coast inside the global fuel supply chain, close enough to nudge prices and trade flows that touch American markets. It is also a rare counterweight in an IPO calendar dominated by artificial intelligence, a physical, cash-generating industrial asset testing whether emerging-market capital can absorb a deal this size on its own terms.
Dangote plans to roughly double the plant's capacity to 1.4 million barrels a day by 2029, which would make it the largest refinery in the world, and he expects appetite to echo a July private placement that was 3.7 times oversubscribed. Ordinary Nigerians appear willing to believe him. Ibrahim Abubakar, a journalist in Lagos, said he would take up 2,850 shares because the refinery was, in his words, “too big to fail.”
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