Nigerian’s changing diet unveils a 170-million-strong market Rachel Amos remembers growing up in Lagos on a diet of mashed unripe bananas and a homemade pudding of maize, sugar and water. In her eyes, buying food in grocery stores was only something rich people did. Amos, now a 24-year-old tailor, has moved into the ranks of supermarket patrons. She has turned away from buying from street vendors, choosing instead to shop for items like Nestle SA-made cereal and Unilever’s Close Up toothpaste at a Spar International outlet near the shantytown she lives in. “Supermarkets are better,” Amos said as her two-year-old daughter Joy wheeled a shopping cart through Spar’s aisles. “They sell original things, it’s neater and there are no flies.” It’s people like Amos, whose saga captures the potential for growth in Nigerians’ purchasing power, that are prompting foreign investors to look past the militant attacks in the African nation’s northern region and pile into consumer-focused stocks. In Nigeria, they see semblances of the consumer boom that swept through Brazil, China and India over the past decade: an underdeveloped country home to a population of about 170 million that is consistently posting annual economic growth above 6 percent. “The premium is here to stay,” Anton Schaad, a money manager at St. Galler Kantonalbank AG, which oversees $48 billion, said by e-mail from St. Gallen, Switzerland yesterday. “I don’t really fear a crash.” Lagos is among five African cities -- including Johannesburg and Cairo -- that will each have more than $25 billion a year in consumer spending by 2020, equivalent to Mumbai and New Delhi, according to a 2010 McKinsey & Co. report. Across all of Africa, the middle class is estimated at 350 million people, or more than the number of people living in the U.S., according to the African Development Bank. The definition of consumers should be broadened beyond the middle class to include everyone living above the poverty line, which is growing at a faster pace, Silk’s Bekkali said. He estimates that over the next 15 years, the number of Africans living above the poverty line will grow by about 500 million.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 23:10:36 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015