Aliko Dangote, Chairman of Dangote Industries Limited (DIL), has disclosed that the initial public offering (IPO) of the company’s refinery business failed to meet its target of attracting 10 million investors.
Dangote, however, said the offer recorded participation from millions of investors, describing the level of demand as significant despite falling short of the target.
He spoke at the 25th annual conference of Women in Management, Business and Public Service (WIMBIZ) in Lagos, where he attributed the shortfall to time constraints and difficulties some prospective investors encountered in accessing the offer.
The billionaire businessman said the exact number of participating investors was yet to be officially determined.
“We cannot tell the figure right away because we have not reported to this, but we’ve gotten an amazing demand from various people,” he said.
Comparing the level of participation with other major public offerings, Dangote said the refinery IPO had attracted millions of investors, exceeding the participation recorded in some prominent African and international offers.
“If you look at it, the largest participating shareholders, like here now, was I think GTBank. When they did their own, it was 200,000. Okay, we are talking about millions of people that participated,” he said.
He cited Kenya’s Safaricom offering, which attracted fewer than 900,000 investors, and Saudi Aramco’s global offering, which recorded about five million investors.
“We didn’t hit the 10 million because of time constraint, and a lot of people, they didn’t know how to access,” Dangote said.
He described the response as evidence of growing public confidence in investment opportunities and the capacity of African businesses to mobilise domestic capital.
“But it’s the shared trust of public enterprise that we have today in Africa, and that’s why people are now beginning to remove that money under their mattresses to go and invest,” he added.
The Dangote refinery IPO, tagged ‘The People’s IPO’, offered 4.1 billion shares at N525 each, with a minimum subscription of 10 shares valued at N5,250.
The offer opened on September 14 and was subsequently extended to October 27.
Before the offer commenced, Dangote had announced a target of 10 million retail investors as part of efforts to broaden ownership of the refinery beyond institutional and high-net-worth investors.
Reuters reported that more than two million investors had subscribed through digital channels before the offer closed, while the IPO attracted about N6.4 trillion in orders from Nigerian retail and institutional investors, approximately three times the targeted offer size.
Dangote had also disclosed that applications came from 120 countries, including all 54 African countries.
Asked whether the IPO had changed his perception of Africa’s capacity to mobilise capital from within the continent, he said the experience had significantly altered his outlook.
“I think yes, it has actually changed. It has changed things dramatically. Things are really changing very fast,” he said.
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