Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals is set to go to the capital market with its initial public offering (IPO) in September, driven by overwhelming investor demand.
President of the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, who gave the confirmation on Wednesday, said investor demands have reached $2 billion for the planned private placement, reflecting massive market confidence in the company’s offer.
“There is quite a lot of demand for the IPO we have right now,” Dangote stated in an interview with journalists after leading First HoldCo chairman Femi Otedola and top executives of the company on a tour of the refinery complex in Lagos on Wednesday.
“We will make sure that by September, we will be out there in the market to sell the IPO. We have a lot of demands in billions of dollars.
When we even said we are going to do a private placement, we already have people who have requested to buy, and we have an amount of almost $2 billion. We are not selling up to that, but we can see what we can allocate to IPO,” he added.
He said that while embarking on the IPO, they will not forget the banks that have helped the company to get to where it is.
The Africa’s richest man said the refinery aims to produce about 10 per cent of America’s entire refining capacity and will become the largest refinery ever built on earth. He further projected that the refinery will have the highest turnover of any business in Africa.
Dangote also stated that the refinery’s size and projected earnings have continued to attract the interest of investors across the world.
He emphasised that the IPO is designed to allow ordinary Nigerians and retail investors to participate, drawing comparisons to early investments in companies like Amazon and Apple
“What we are trying to do is actually bring in people when it is at this low level and for them to have an upside.”
“We want it to be like when you buy Amazon or you buy Apple. All those people everybody has become a millionaire. And that’s what we want to bring into Africa,” he stated.
Otedola revealed that he sold his stake in Geregu Power specifically to reinvest $100 million into the Dangote Refinery private placement.
“On a personal note, I’ve appealed to him (Dangote), I’ve been here with him 25 times, so my compensation is he’s going to allocate to me shares worth $100 million in the private placement,” Otedola said.
“That’s one of the reasons I sold my stake in Geregu, to come and invest my proceeds in the IPO of Dangote Refinery,” the billionaire investor added.
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The 650,000 barrels per day refinery located in the Lekki Free Zone in Lagos, Nigeria, commenced operations in early 2024 with the production of diesel. It subsequently began large-scale production of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), also known as petrol and aviation fuel in the same year, drastically reducing Nigeria’s import dependency for petroleum products.
The current plan is to list about 10 per cent of the $20 billion refinery across multiple African exchanges (and potentially London) in a pattern that reflects the value-creation structures of global tech giants like Amazon or Apple.
This capital push comes at a time when the Dangote Refinery is navigating some regulatory headwinds. Last week, the refinery filed a fresh lawsuit at the Federal High Court in Lagos challenging the fuel import licences recently granted by the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) to petroleum marketers, arguing that local production capacity is now fully sufficient under the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) to meet domestic demand.
The massive capital accumulation ahead of September indicates that the market is viewing the refinery’s long-term commercial upside as an unavoidable cornerstone of African industrial infrastructure.
Victor Ezeja is a passionate journalist, scholar and analyst of socioeconomic issues in Nigeria and Africa. He is skilled in energy reporting, business and economy, and holds a master's degree in Mass Communication. He can be reached via @VICTOREZEJA on X