Aliko Dangote, chairman of the Dangote Industries Limited (DIL), says the initial public offering (IPO) of the company’s refinery business did not achieve its 10 million investors target.
But despite falling short of the target, the IPO attracted “millions of investors”, according to Dangote, who spoke at the 25th annual conference of the Women in Management, Business and Public Service (WIMBIZ) in Lagos.
The billionaire said the number of investors is yet to be officially determined, but attributed the shortfall to the limited time available for the offer and difficulties some prospective investors faced in accessing it.
“We cannot tell the figure right away because we have not reported to this, but we’ve gotten an amazing demand from various people,” Dangote said.
“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.”
Dangote said the level of participation was significant when compared with some of the largest public offerings in Africa and globally.
“Even in Kenya, Safaricom was the largest, less than 900,000. Saudi Aramco worldwide was about five million. So, and I’m sure we are not that far away,” he said.
“We didn’t hit the 10 million because of time constraint, and a lot of people, they didn’t know how to access.
“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.”
The Dangote refinery IPO, tagged ‘The People’s IPO’, offered 4.1 billion shares at N525 each, with a minimum subscription of 10 shares costing N5,250.
The offer opened on September 14 and was extended to October 27.
Before the offer opened, Dangote had said the company was targeting 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 — roughly three times the targeted offer size.
Earlier, he said applications came from 120 countries, including all 54 African countries.
Asked whether the IPO had changed his view on how Africa could mobilise capital from within the continent, Dangote said, “I think yes, it has actually changed. It has changed things dramatically. Things are really changing very fast”.