Business Insider Africa recently gained insights from Victor Basta, CEO at DAI Magister, regarding Nigeria’s investment landscape. Despite facing several adverse market conditions such as economic volatility, high inflation rate, exchange rate concerns, and political uncertainty, Nigeria still offers numerous sectors ready for investment. In this article, we will explore these sectors, which include fintech, mobility, agriculture, renewable energy, and infrastructure.
Firstly, fintech has been the most invested sector in Nigeria, and it remains untapped, particularly in sectors such as SME financing, social commerce financing and delivery, aggregation and financing of smallholder farmer output. Mobile money is yet to be rolled out, and services such as insurance and higher-yielding savings are barely deployed at scale. For a $500bn economy, there remains a huge opportunity in core fintech. In addition to leaders such as Flutterwave, Paystack and Interswitch, we are seeing emerging growth companies such as Migo, Carbon, Nomba, and PiggyVest begin to scale to levels which naturally attract international investors who are not ‘required’ to invest in Africa, but rather are looking for a minimum scale irrespective of geography.
Secondly, mobility sectors are a growing area of investment, given Nigeria’s poor infrastructure and lack of rail transport. Companies such as Max.ng and GIG are deploying technology to improve social commerce deliveries and inter-city transport, while Kobo360 is the largest technology-driven long-haul logistics company in the region. Autochek is enabling the resale of vehicles in Nigeria through a tech-enabled vehicle marketplace and financing offerings.
Thirdly, agriculture is Nigeria’s largest sector, and prominent tech-enabled growth companies such as ThriveAgric and Releaf have achieved the scale necessary to attract international capital. Thrive has built a loyal base of nearly half a million smallholder farmers who receive higher prices and better services.
Fourthly, renewable energy, specifically solar, has huge potential, with companies such as Daystar and StarSight expanding operations in Nigeria. There remain a host of players competing in both the residential market and the commercial market. Many of these players, including M-KOPA and d.Light, have also expanded to mobile phones, and will expand further to solar appliances as they fill out their offerings. With the oil price seemingly set to remain high, the economic rationale for accelerating solar deployments in Nigeria is more compelling now than ever before.
Finally, building basic infrastructure for a true Internet economy is essential for Nigeria to attract investment. Kasi and Rack Centre are leading the charge in building modern data centre operations in Lagos.
Nigeria is an essential part of Africa’s growth ambitions, and it’s crucial that it attracts the biggest share of the continent’s $5bn start-up funding. There are dozens of high-quality Nigerian tech-enabled companies that need investment to scale to continental leadership. Many macro factors in Nigeria will begin to moderate in 2023, and with steps that show clear intent, Nigeria can become investable again. (Business Insider Africa).
