By Franklin Iyamah | Industrial policy, which refers to the deliberate action by governments to drive growth in manufacturing, has returned to the centre of economic strategy around the world, first because the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of global supply chains and, more recently, because rising protectionism and geopolitical rivalry have pushed governments back into a more active role in shaping production, resilience and economic security.
Post pandemic, governments across the world have increasingly deployed various industrial policy tools ranging from tariffs, procurement rules, local-content measures, export bans and industrial finance to bolster industrial activity within priority sectors.
For Nigeria, however, this renewed interest raises an old but unresolved question: why has repeated industrial-policy activism often in the form of protectionist measures and import bans failed to deliver structural transformation? The history of economic development in the last fifty years is the story of structural transformation: the process of shifting labour and capital from low-productivity agriculture and informal activity into higher-productivity manufacturing and other tradable sectors, while building domestic capabilities and diversifying exports. Despite possessing several of the necessary conditions for an industrial take-off, including a large labour force, a sizeable domestic market and a geographic position that gives it reach across West Africa and the wider continent, Nigeria boasts of a mixed record on industrialisation. Although manufacturing growth improved in the post-1999 period, the sector has remained shallow and has not sustained the kind of deepening required for structural transformation, while the wider economy continues to depend heavily on oil, imports and low-productivity activity. With non-tradable sectors still accounting for 56% of output in 2025, Nigeria has moved away from an agrarian base without building a sufficiently strong industrial core.
This paper makes two linked arguments. First, Nigeria’s industrial-policy failures reflect less a shortage of ambition than a weak instrument mix as Nigerian governments have leaned too heavily on protectionist measures and discretionary incentives while underinvesting in the public goods that make manufacturing firms competitive, namely reliable power, logistics, skills, standards, coordination and long-term finance. In addition, Nigerian policymakers have inadvertently favoured expansion in capital-intensive industrial sectors too early in an economy whose underlying conditions called for a different sequence. Second, a more credible industrial strategy must begin from Nigeria’s actual structure: a large agrarian base, abundant labour, shallow industrial capabilities, a large domestic market and tight fiscal and administrative constraints. Those conditions point towards a selective, capability-building strategy focused on labour-absorbing and agro-linked tradable sectors rather than another broad cycle of protection.
Nigeria’s Long Search for Industrialisation
Before independence, Nigeria’s colonial economy was organised mainly around the export of raw materials such as cocoa, groundnuts, palm produce, cotton and tin, while serving at the same time as a market for imported British manufactured goods. Roads, railways, ports and trading networks were therefore built chiefly to move produce from the hinterland to the coast rather than to integrate domestic production across regions, with the result that Nigeria entered independence with commerce stronger than production and with trading networks deeper than industrial capability. It was in this setting that foreign merchant houses occupied the commanding position in import-export trade, so that the economy’s most powerful actors were traders and commercial intermediaries.
As Peter Kilby showed in “Industrialisation in an Open Economy: Nigeria 1945–1966”, industrialisation in Nigeria began at the edge of trade led by foreign merchant firms such as United Africa Company (UAC) and John Holt. Facing thin profit margins in the trading sector, these firms moved selectively into light manufacturing and assembly to get the protection of tariff walls and domestic licensing rules. From the outset, then, the industrial question in Nigeria was largely shaped by merchant interests, imported inputs and the politics of market access more than by any deliberate effort to build technological depth.
Appendices 1 and 2 show the range of these investments, which extended from timber, beverages and joinery to vehicle assembly, cotton yarn, tanneries, rubber processing, metal products and consumer manufactures. The breadth of these portfolios is revealing. They were genuine industrial investments, but they were also the moves of diversified merchant groups extending their commercial reach into protected manufacturing and processing lines, rather than the emergence of a concentrated industrial class organised around deep local capability-building.
After independence, this merchant trading inheritance continued to shape government policy. In the 1962–68 National Development Plan, import substitution was placed at the centre of Nigeria’s industrial strategy, in line with the wider mood across much of the developing world. Nigeria wanted to reduce dependence on imported finished goods, encourage local ownership and give domestic firms room to grow. That strategy can work, but only when protection is tied to productivity growth, export discipline, technological learning and eventual graduation from support. However, Nigeria did not manage that transition well as tariffs, import licences and quantitative restrictions created rents for incumbent firms which still lacked reliable electricity, workable transport corridors, technical skills, supplier networks, standards and machinery-maintenance capacity.
The oil boom of the 1970s magnified both ambition and distortion. Rising oil revenues gave the Nigerian state the resources to finance larger industrial dreams, but rather than use that moment to build the infrastructural and technical foundations of a competitive industrial economy, policy increasingly turned towards indigenisation, public ownership and prestige projects. The indigenisation decrees of 1972 and 1977 were politically popular because they promised to transfer control of major sectors to Nigerians, yet ownership transfer is not the same thing as capability transfer. As Thomas Biersteker (1987) later argued, economic nationalism changed control rights and political narratives more readily than it transferred technology, managerial depth or industrial strategy, which meant that the commanding heights could change hands without becoming more productive or more developmentally effective.
Oil wealth also made it easier to finance public enterprises and heavy industry ventures, including the steel schemes that came to symbolise the promise of rapid industrial modernity. But those projects rested on imported machinery, imported inputs and thin domestic supply chains, so they were fragile from the beginning. What this meant in practice was that many firms entered manufacturing from trade, not from a long-term process of technological accumulation. Under tariff protection, import licensing and a strong currency, that could still be profitable, since it was easier to import machinery, components and intermediate goods, assemble locally and sell into a protected domestic market than to build the slower foundations of competitiveness through worker training, engineering capability, local supplier development and product standards. In that sense, the policy regime rewarded mercantile adaptation more than industrial learning, which helps explain why backward linkages into agriculture and local input supply remained weak, while forward linkages into export markets were weaker still.
The crisis of the 1980s, as commodity prices weakened and oil revenues came under pressure, exposed the weaknesses of import substitution industrialisation quite brutally. Structural adjustment from 1986 brought devaluation, trade liberalisation, subsidy cuts and a retreat from the older model of state-led industrialism. Some distortions of the previous era clearly needed correction, but adjustment also opened the economy before deeper productive capabilities had been built, so that firms which had survived behind tariff walls now had to operate in a more open but much harsher environment marked by poor infrastructure, high borrowing costs and continued dependence on imported inputs. Many could not survive, and nowhere was the damage more visible than in textiles, garments and footwear, which had once offered one of Nigeria’s clearest routes into labour-intensive manufacturing and large-scale industrial employment. Exchange-rate instability, smuggling, weak power supply and rising production costs combined to weaken a sector that might otherwise have become an important bridge from low-productivity activity into modern manufacturing.
The return to democratic rule after 1999 brought a different policy language, but not a full break from this longer pattern. Industrial ambition returned through visions, masterplans, roadmaps, sector strategies and special economic zones, and there were real gains in some areas. Cement remains the clearest example of backward integration working under the right combination of market size, policy support and sustained private investment (even when the gains in this sector has not translated to lower prices for consumers largely because of competition failure). Fertiliser and parts of agro-processing have shown that focused value-chain strategies can produce visible results. Even so, these successes remained selective rather than economy-wide. Nigeria grew strongly in parts of the 2000s and 2010s, but much of that growth came from oil, trade, telecommunications and other services rather than from deepening manufacturing capability, so that the economy expanded without sufficiently transforming its productive base.
The data tells the same story. Manufacturing rose from about 4.6% of GDP in 1960 to around 8% by the late 1960s, which shows that the early phase of import substitution did create some real industrial activity. But that momentum did not hold. By 1975, manufacturing had fallen back to about 4.4% of GDP, before recovering to roughly 11% in 1980. The oil-era industry numbers flatter the story because crude petroleum did most of the heavy lifting. In 1975, industry accounted for 27.5% of GDP, but crude petroleum alone contributed 21.2%, leaving non-oil industry at only 6.2%. By 1980, headline industry had risen to 34.6% of GDP, yet non-oil industry was only 13.2% once crude oil was removed. In other words, the apparent industrial surge of the oil years was driven far more by petroleum than by broad-based industrial deepening.
Source: CBN
The post-1981 series confirms the longer pattern of fragility. Manufacturing accounted for about 20.1% of GDP in 1985, then fell to 13.2% by 1995, 11.7% by 2000 and 6.5% by 2010. It recovered only modestly to 8.5% in 2024 and 9.0% in 2025. Non-oil industry followed a similar path, dropping from about 22.4% of GDP in 1985 to 9.8% in 2010, before rising to 12.8% in 2024 and 14.2% in 2025. The data shows a clear pattern: Nigeria did industrialise in part, but it did not sustain industrial deepening. What the country achieved was a short industrial push, then a long weakening, then a mild recovery that still falls short of structural transformation.
Why Industrial Policy Repeatedly Failed in Nigeria
Nigeria delivered unrestrained protection in exchange for nothing: The most persistent policy failure has been a weak hierarchy of instruments. Nigeria repeatedly chose protective tools before capability-building tools. Tariffs, local-content rules, procurement preferences, export bans and tax concessions can create temporary advantages for domestic firms, but they do not solve the underlying productivity problem. Power, logistics, skills systems, standards, industrial parks, testing facilities, export support and supplier-development programmes do. Nigeria leaned heavily towards the first set because those tools were politically visible, administratively familiar and immediately useful to incumbents. By contrast, capability-building required coordination across ministries, regulators, infrastructure providers, training institutions and finance agencies. It took longer and delivered benefits more slowly. In that political economy, protection was easier to announce than capability was to build. The result was predictable: firms were often sheltered before they were ready, and sometimes instead of being made ready. Tariffs could preserve margins, local-content rules could create captive demand, and procurement preferences could guarantee markets, but none of these instruments could substitute for electricity that arrives when factories need it, ports that clear inputs predictably, vocational systems that produce technicians, or supplier-development programmes that deepen local sourcing. In successful late industrialisers, protection was usually embedded within a wider system of discipline, learning and support. In Nigeria, it too often became the system itself.
Source: WTO
Table 1. Selected phases of Nigeria’s trade policy regime, 1960–2026
Nigeria backed the wrong sectors too early: The second failure was poor sequencing. Nigeria repeatedly aimed for sectors that were too capital-intensive, too import-dependent and too-infrastructure hungry for its actual conditions. Steel, vehicle assembly and related heavy-industry ambitions carried prestige because they looked like modernity, but they also demanded technical depth, logistics and capital intensity that the economy had not yet built. A labour-abundant economy usually starts its industrial rise in sectors that absorb workers at relatively low capital cost while building supplier networks, organisational capability and export discipline over time. Textiles, garments, leather, furniture, food processing and other light manufactures have played that role in many late industrialisers. Nigeria had the labour force, market size and agricultural base to go much further in that direction than it did. Instead, policy often privileged prestige sectors with weaker employment effects and higher dependence on imported machinery and inputs. That decision reduced labour absorption and deepened foreign exchange dependence at the same time.
The bias towards heavy and capital-intensive projects imposed two costs at once. On the one hand, it reduced the labour-absorbing power of industrialisation, so that surplus labour did not move in large numbers into robust factory employment but instead drifted into urban informality and low-productivity services. On the other hand, it deepened dependence on foreign exchange, since sectors built on imported machinery, spare parts, technology and technical services become highly vulnerable when exchange-rate pressure mounts. In that setting, macroeconomic instability quickly becomes an industrial problem, because fluctuations in the currency feed directly into production costs, investment planning and supply reliability.
Box 1: Vietnam’s Industrialisation: A Compact Case Study for NigeriaVietnam’s industrialisation is especially useful for Nigeria because it shows that successful structural transformation in a late-developing economy does not usually begin with advanced manufacturing, but rather with a deliberate sequencing of reforms through which the state first repairs incentives in agriculture, then restores macroeconomic coherence, and only afterwards uses trade openness and foreign investment to accelerate industrial deepening. The pivotal break came with the Đổi Mới reforms of 1986, which loosened the communist command system, expanded the role of market prices, gave households stronger production incentives, and was reinforced by the 1987 Law on Foreign Investment, which formally opened the economy to foreign capital. What followed was not an overnight jump from rice fields to electronics, but a cumulative transition in which agricultural productivity, export earnings, and policy credibility created the preconditions for industrial take-off. That sequencing mattered because Vietnam was still heavily agrarian at the outset: agriculture accounted for roughly 39% of GDP in 1990, whereas by 2023 its share had fallen to less than 12%.
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Nigeria built factories with shallow domestic linkages: Industrialisation is not just about having factories. It is about building an economy that learns, sources locally, processes more of its own inputs, feeds downstream services and becomes more productive over time. Nigeria did not do enough of that. Manufacturing remained concentrated, import dependent and weakly connected to the rest of the economy. Oil dominated exports and public revenue but generated few domestic production linkages. This weakness showed up in three ways. First, domestic value addition stayed low where raw materials, components and machinery were still imported. Second, backward and forward linkages remained weak because firms did not source deeply from local suppliers and did not feed into broad downstream systems of logistics, packaging, engineering, design and export marketing. Third, productivity remained subdued because firms could survive without learning very much. Under these conditions, Nigeria is able to generate episodes of industrial activity, but not enough to deliver the kind of cumulative productivity growth and inter-sector linkages on which structural transformation depends.
Nigeria never solved industrial finance or policy credibility: A fourth failure, and one that is often underplayed in debates on industrial policy, lay in the unresolved question of industrial finance. Industrialisation requires long-term capital, patient balance sheets and some capacity to manage risk over long investment cycles, yet Nigerian finance has typically been short term, expensive and highly exposed to macroeconomic volatility. Firms have faced high working-capital costs, unreliable access to long-tenor credit, limited export finance and repeated foreign-exchange disruptions that complicate input procurement and undermine planning.
This financing weakness became even more damaging because it operated within a wider environment of instability. Even a well-chosen sector will struggle where the cost of capital is prohibitive (20-30%), the exchange-rate regime is volatile and access to imported inputs is uncertain, while a badly-chosen sector will fail even faster under those same conditions. Nigerian governments have repeatedly announced intervention funds, subsidised windows and special credit schemes, but these have rarely added up to a durable financing architecture that links development finance, guarantees, export finance, infrastructure finance and performance discipline. The result has often been episodic relief rather than strategic transformation, with firms receiving temporary support but not the stable financial environment needed to invest, scale and upgrade.
Policy credibility then compounds the problem. Investors do not respond only to incentives written into policy documents; they respond to whether those policies survive election cycles, whether trade rules remain predictable, whether infrastructure projects are actually completed and whether state agencies can coordinate without repeatedly shifting the terms of production. Nigeria’s industrial history has been marked by reversals, partial implementation, overlapping institutions and uncertain timelines, all of which raise the hurdle rate for long-term investment and encourage firms to prefer short-horizon activities and trading margins over deeper industrial bets. In that sense, weak policy credibility has not been a side issue but part of the core explanation for why industrial policy has struggled to produce durable structural change.
A Practical Framework for the Next Phase
If the historical diagnosis is correct, Nigeria does not need a completely different conversation about industrial policy. It needs a stricter one. The country’s next phase of industrialisation should be built around a smaller number of ideas carried through more consistently
Start with sectors that fit Nigeria’s real economy: Any serious industrial strategy should begin with a simple proposition: Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of labour. It suffers from a shortage of productive sectors that can absorb labour at scale. That is the key insight from the first black Nobel laureate Arthur Lewis. A second guide comes from Heckscher-Ohlin and the broader logic of comparative advantage. Countries tend to industrialise more successfully when they begin in activities that make effective use of their relatively abundant factors, even if they do not remain in those activities forever. Nigeria is labour abundant, has a substantial agricultural base and possesses important resource endowments, yet it remains relatively capital scarce and infrastructure constrained. A sensible first stage of industrialisation would therefore lean towards labour-intensive and resource-based tradables, especially agro-processing, textiles and garments, leather, wood products, building materials and other consumer manufactures that can draw on domestic demand while also creating room for export learning. As illustrated in Box 1, Vietnam offers a useful lesson. It did not begin with a broad heavy-industry leap. It moved from agrarian reform into labour-intensive manufacturing, built export discipline, improved logistics and then upgraded gradually into more complex production. Nigeria cannot copy Vietnam line for line, but it can learn the sequencing logic. Build the broad base first. Upgrade from there.
Industrial policy must be executed with first-choice tools, not second-choice defaults: The next requirement is to reverse the hierarchy of instruments. Nigeria should start where previous rounds often started too late: with the direct public inputs that reduce the cost and risk of production. Reliable power for industrial users, logistics connectivity, industrial land, common services, quality and testing infrastructure, applied technical training, supplier-development support and export facilitation are not side issues. They are the core of industrial policy. They are the means through which firms become capable of competing without permanent protection. This does not mean tariffs, local-content rules and procurement preferences disappear altogether. It means they cease to be the main story. Where second-choice instruments are used, they should be temporary, narrow and conditional. A tariff differential can make sense for a sector that has a plausible upgrading path, measurable productivity targets and a clear sunset clause. A local-content requirement can make sense where upstream capability is being actively built and monitored. What should end is the habit of using these tools as a substitute for real competitiveness.
Create location-based industrial ecosystems: Third, industrialisation should become more spatially-selective, and place-based and not driven by federalist political considerations. Nigeria has often behaved as if industrial policy could be implemented evenly across the federation through announcements from Abuja. It cannot. Industry is spatial. Firms care about power reliability, transport times, clustering effects, local labour pools, land access, customs efficiency and the presence of suppliers and service providers. If these conditions are not assembled in actual places, industrial policy remains rhetorical. Policymakers should focus on genuinely competitive industrial ecosystems built around corridors and clusters with real economic logic such as the Lagos-Ibadan corridor, the Aba-Onitsha-Nnewi triangle, Kano-Kaduna and selected coastal energy-and-logistics nodes that offer different possibilities. The objective should not be geographic balancing for the sake of federal character, rather it should be to demonstrate, in a handful of places, that Nigeria can provide what industry requires: stable power, serviced land, one-stop regulation, customs efficiency, skills partnerships, testing facilities and transport connectivity.
This is where many agrarian-to-industrial success stories are instructive. Zones and clusters work when they solve coordination failures in specific places. They do not work when they are detached from logistics or treated mainly as land allocation schemes. Nigeria’s own history contains warnings. The Calabar Free Trade Zone is a reminder that a zone without its complementary infrastructure can become a monument to planning failure. Place-based industrial policy should therefore be disciplined by a simple rule: no zone, park or corridor should be designated unless the infrastructure, governance and financing for delivery are already credible.
Solve the industrial finance problem: Fourth, Nigeria must treat industrial finance as part of industrial policy itself, not as an afterthought. Too much policy discussion still assumes that once a sector is prioritised, finance will somehow follow. In practice, the cost, tenor and risk structure of finance often determine whether industrial investment is viable at all. Long-gestation manufacturing projects cannot be financed on the same basis as short-cycle trading. Exporting firms need working capital, hedging capacity and logistics finance. Supplier upgrading often requires medium-term loans for equipment and certification. Industrial parks require project finance and risk-sharing mechanisms. None of this can be left to shallow commercial banking alone.
Nigeria therefore needs a more coherent industrial finance architecture. At a minimum, this should include a stronger development-finance window for priority value chains, credit guarantees that crowd in private lenders rather than displace them, export finance linked to actual market-development strategies, and blended-finance structures for industrial infrastructure. The Bank of Industry, the Nigerian Export-Import Bank (NEXIM) and related institutions should not simply expand balance sheets; they should operate within a clearer national framework tied to sector strategy, firm performance and monitoring. Support should be targeted, transparent and conditional.
The discipline point is crucial. Limited fiscal space means Nigeria cannot run an open-ended subsidy regime. Public finance should be used where it relaxes genuine coordination and risk constraints, not where it merely socialises commercial losses. That suggests a preference for instruments that leverage private capital and reward performance: guarantee schemes, co-investment platforms, corridor finance tied to infrastructure delivery, and financing linked to export orders, local supplier development or technology upgrading. The test of industrial finance is not whether money has been disbursed. It is whether productive capabilities have expanded.
Use exports, performance discipline and institutions to lock in upgrading: Fifth, industrial policy must reintroduce discipline. One of the greatest weaknesses of earlier Nigerian industrial strategies was that support was often granted without clear performance benchmarks. Firms could remain protected while learning very little. That cannot continue. The surest long-term check on rent-seeking industrial policy is exposure to some form of external discipline, whether through exports, measurable productivity targets, supplier-development milestones or time-bound review mechanisms.
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) makes this even more important. Nigeria’s large market is an advantage, but domestic scale alone can easily encourage complacency if firms remain sheltered. Regional and continental markets change the calculus. They make it more plausible for Nigerian firms to scale, but only if those firms can meet standards, deliver on time and compete on cost and quality. That requires a different industrial-state posture: less defensive protection of the home market, more active assistance with market entry, standards compliance, certification, trade logistics and commercial intelligence.
Institutions matter because someone must hold the line on these conditions. Nigeria does not need an endless multiplication of agencies. It needs clearer responsibility, fewer overlapping mandates and stronger monitoring. A lead industrial strategy unit should coordinate across finance, trade, power, customs, training and subnational governments. Priority sectors should be few enough to monitor seriously. Support measures should come with review dates and transparent criteria for renewal or withdrawal. Industrial zones and corridor projects should publish delivery scorecards. Skill compacts should be tied to actual employer demand. Procurement preferences, where used, should require evidence of local capability deepening rather than mere local assembly.
This is the point at which the latest industrial policy can either break with history or repeat it. Its monitoring architecture, implementation plans and subnational emphasis are potentially valuable. But institutions only matter if they can say no as well as say yes. A credible industrial policy is not one that promises support to everyone. It is one that allocates scarce public resources to a small number of problems, measures results and unwinds failing interventions. The politics of this will not be easy. Yet without that discipline, industrial policy returns to what it has too often been in Nigeria: a language of ambition without a mechanism of transformation.
Conclusion
Nigeria’s industrial problem has never been a simple absence of policy ambition. Over seven decades, the country has experimented with import substitution, indigenisation, public enterprise, liberalisation, sector plans and renewed industrial activism, yet across these different moments one pattern has remained strikingly constant: protection and incentives have moved faster than infrastructure, skills, productive linkages, finance and institutional discipline. The result has been episodes of industrial activity, but not the sustained structural transformation needed to move labour into higher-productivity sectors, deepen domestic capability and diversify the economy in a durable way.
The central lesson of this paper is therefore not that industrial policy is futile, but that its content and sequencing matter greatly. Nigeria is most likely to make progress when it begins from the conditions the economy actually has, rather than from the industrial structure policymakers may wish it already possessed. That means starting with labour-absorbing and agro-linked tradable sectors, concentrating effort in real industrial ecosystems, building capability through power, logistics, skills, standards and finance, and ensuring that any protection or preference remains narrow, time-bound and tied to performance. Lastly, the state does not need to replace the market, rather it needs to do what markets alone will not do, namely coordinate investment, reduce risk, build public inputs and impose discipline. That is the real test of whether Nigeria’s next phase of industrial policy will finally deliver structural transformation.
Appendix 1. Industrial investments of the United Africa Company (UAC, later UACN), 1948–65
|
Company |
Product |
Start-up year |
Fixed capital |
UAC equity |
|
African Timber & Plywood |
Timber and plywood |
1948 |
3,000 |
100 |
|
Nigerian Breweries (3) |
Beer and minerals |
1949 |
3,500 |
33 |
|
Taylor Woodrow |
Building contractors |
1953 |
500ᵇ |
50 |
|
Nigerian Joinery (3) |
Woodwork and furniture |
1953 |
100ᵇ |
50 |
|
Prestress |
Pre-stressed concrete |
1954 |
40 |
20 |
|
Nipol |
Plastic products |
1957 |
105 |
35 |
|
Raleigh Industries (3) |
Cycle assembly |
1958 |
75 |
50 |
|
Vehicle Assembly Plant |
Bedford lorries |
1958 |
500 |
100 |
|
Minna Farm |
Pigs |
1959 |
35 |
80 |
|
Northern Construction Co. |
Building contractors |
1960 |
100 |
30 |
|
W. A. Thread |
Sewing thread |
1961 |
450 |
20 |
|
W. A. Portland Cement |
Cement |
1961 |
4,500 |
10 |
|
W. A. Cold Storage |
Meat products |
1961 |
250 |
100 |
|
Walls |
Ice cream |
1961 |
90 |
100 |
|
Vono Products |
Beds, mattresses |
1961 |
80 |
38 |
|
Cement Paints |
Cement paint |
1962 |
35 |
16 |
|
Guinness |
Stout |
1962 |
2,000 |
33 |
|
Fan Milk |
Re-constituted milk |
1963 |
100 |
45 |
|
The Nigerian Sugar Co. |
Sugar and by-products |
1963 |
3,800 |
7 |
|
Norspin |
Cotton yarn |
1963 |
1,100 |
53 |
|
Pye |
Radio assembly |
1963 |
40 |
50 |
|
Vitafoam |
Foam rubber products |
1964 |
100 |
50 |
|
A. J. Seward |
Perfumery and cosmetics |
1964 |
200 |
100 |
|
Bordpak |
Fibre board cartons |
1964 |
800 |
100 |
|
Kwara Tobacco Co. |
Cigarettes |
1964 |
500 |
80 |
|
Associated Battery Mfgrs. |
Vehicle batteries |
1965 |
65ᵇ |
22 |
|
Crocodile Matches |
Matches |
1965 |
120 |
51 |
|
Textile Printers |
Printed textiles |
1965 |
3,250 |
68 |
Note: Fixed capital includes equity, capital reserves and long-term debt as of 1965. Figures in brackets show the number of plants; ᵇ indicates the author’s estimate.
Source: Adapted from Kilby, based on information supplied by UAC and on compiled fixed-capital data from Link, press releases and the Registrar of Companies / Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
Appendix 2. Industrial investments of John Holt & Company, 1948–63
|
Company |
Description |
Year |
Equity capital |
Holt equity |
|
Costain |
Construction |
1948 |
400 |
6 |
|
Holt Tanneries |
— |
1949 |
150 |
53 |
|
P. S. Mandrides |
Groundnut crushing |
1960 |
625 |
10 |
|
Holt Rubber Co. |
Rubber crêping |
1962 |
120 |
100 |
|
Thomas Wyatt |
Stationery |
1948 |
220 |
30 |
|
Nigerian Breweries |
— |
1949 |
1,500 |
7 |
|
Nigerian Canning Co. |
Corned beef |
1956 |
100 |
30 |
|
Critall-Hope |
Metal doors, etc. |
1958 |
160 |
14 |
|
Asbestos Cement Products |
— |
1960 |
1,000 |
3 |
|
Nigerian Enamelware Co. |
— |
1961 |
130 |
50 |
|
Haco |
Perfume and plastics |
1963 |
175 |
51 |
Note: Equity capital is not directly comparable to the fixed-capital measure used in Table 1, which included capital reserves and long-term debt. Holt’s 51 per cent stake in Haco was purchased for £310,000.
Source: Adapted from Kilby, based on data supplied by John Holt & Company of Liverpool.
Selected References
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