Dangote Cement on track to listing on London Stock Exchange next year

Aliko Dangote – the founder and CEO of the Dangote Group, plans to sell shares of his Nigeria-based cement company in London in about September 2019, and says his oil refinery in Lagos is on track to produce fuel in 2020.

He is waiting for Nigerian elections in early 2019 and for a sell-off in emerging markets to pass before starting an initial public offering (IPO) of Dangote Cement, he said in an interview at the New Economy Forum in Singapore. He did not give details on how much he wanted to raise or what percentage of the company he would sell.

About 15 percent of its stock is already listed in Lagos, where it has a market value of ₦3.5 trillion US$9.6 billion.

Dangote Cement is in talks about a potential acquisition of a company with operations in Kenya and Tanzania, he said in a separate interview with Bloomberg TV without saying the name of the firm.

The oil refinery, designed to process 650,000 barrels a day of crude oil, should start producing fuel in the first quarter of 2020 and be at full capacity within 6 months of that, he said.

“We will ramp up very quickly,” he said. “There are so many challenges but we are going very fast.”

Dangote is worth US$11.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. As well as the refinery and cement, he is investing billions of dollars in rice, sugar and dairy products and aims to buy oil and gas blocs in Nigeria’s Niger River delta.

Source: Bloomberg News