Nigerian Millionaires will Dramatically Increase Over the Next Four Years

More Nigerians are becoming very wealthy. According to a new report by New World Wealth, Nigerian millionaires will jump by a whopping 47 percent in the next four years. Andrew Amoils, analyst at New World Wealth advised CNBC Africa, “We look at a number of factors, we look at trends in the market, the historical growth factors, we look at GDP growth going forward, the forecast on that and we try make estimates on how we think the property market and the real estate market is going to perform.”

According to Amoils, the number of Nigerians with investable assets of at least $1 million will increase 23,000 by 2017. “We look at wealth according to the number of people that have made one million dollars from a sector so it doesn’t necessarily correlate to the growth of that sector. For instance, there’s a lot of countries like Vietnam which hasn’t had strong index real estate growth in the last six years, but the number of people who have made money from the real estate has been astronomical.”

The reason for the increase lies in the country’s economy, which grown on average of 8.2 percent annually since 1999 with the third highest number of millionaires on the continent after South Africa and Egypt. Also, according to the report, nearly 26 percent of Nigeria’s $82 billion wealth was located offshore last year, with most of the private banking funds deposited in the UK, Switzerland and the Channel Islands.

Amoils also said, “That trend is common globally, it is a relatively high percentage for an African country obviously, there’s a lot of Nigerian people that have money in the UK and Switzerland, and property in those countries.”

Source: AFK Insider