Giants Stomping Through the Growth
Forget trying to be a pioneer, hacking your way through the jungle of a new market. The smart money, I think, follows the giants who have already paved the road. Think about it. Companies like Coca-Cola and Unilever have been in Nigeria for decades. They’ve built the distribution networks, navigated the bureaucracy, and embedded their products into the daily lives of millions. When disposable income in Lagos inches up, who benefits? The people selling the soap, the cooking oil, and the fizzy drinks. They are the established tollbooths on a rapidly expanding economic motorway.
Then you have the modernisers, like Visa. As Nigeria’s economy slowly, sometimes painfully, lurches away from cash, Visa is there to process every single digital transaction. Each tap of a card or phone is a tiny victory for them. They are tapping directly into the city’s digital transformation, a trend that seems almost unstoppable. Investing in these global titans is, to my mind, the most pragmatic way to get a piece of the Nigerian growth story. You get their expertise, their scale, and their diversification, all without having to book a flight yourself.
