Nigeria is a fantastic place to do business
Recently I embarked on a trip to the Nigerian Capital of Lagos to attend an event hosted by Enterprise Ireland and to meet some of our African partners and clients. The trip proved to be a thoroughly worthwhile experience for 2 reasons:
It was fantastic to put a face to the various correspondences we have in Nigeria
It was a thoroughly enlightening experience and opened my mind up to just how false my pre-conceptions were about the nation itself.
For the last number of years, we have built up some very strong and lasting business customers and partners in Nigeria and although they have always been an important and reliable section of our renewals business we didn’t investigate the potential to expand our business further in Nigeria or indeed Africa generally. Thinking about this now, I question how much of the inactivity or lack of emphasis on Nigeria was based on the pre-conceptions many of us have about the country and the state of doing business there.
I am pleased to report that those pre-conceptions couldn’t be further from the truth. What I was met with once touching down in Lagos was a bustling, growing economy that is ripe with business opportunity for Irish technology companies who make the effort to connect and engage with market stakeholders. A thriving Fintech economy exists, rivalling anywhere else on the globe and for those companies savvy enough operating in aligned industries, you could do far worse than reaching out to local partners or Irish business representatives in Nigeria and start having some initial prospecting conversations.
The realities of an economy historically ravaged by mismanagement have been rectified by large scale economic reform over the past decade and now what stands instead is a nation with a growing economy that is technically affluent and well educated, a population of over 200 million and growing at a rate of 2.65% and is set to hit 300 million by the year 2036 and the 27th largest GDP in the world at almost 400 billion.
The event I attended and spoke at has certainly been a huge eye opener to us at PixAlert and has helped to restructure how we not only think and plan on conducting business in Nigeria in the future, but also other opportunities that may exist in less traditional growing markets.