Barely a year after Dangote Petroleum Refinery commenced operations, its founder Alhaji Aliko Dangote’s net worth has risen from $13.4bn to $23.9bn.
This increase in wealth has catapulted him to the 86th wealthiest man in the world. Previously in 2024, the financial media giant Forbes ranked him 114th. Thanks to his 92.3% stake in the Lagos-based Dangote Refinery, his wealth has now surged, placing him among the top 100 richest men.
The last time the 67-year-old Nigerian billionaire was in the top 100 was in 2018, as reported by the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List.
With the latest ranking, the Lagos-based businessman has created a wide gap between himself and his ‘rival’ on the continent, South Africa’s Johann Rupert. At the time of publication, Rupert was ranked 161st in the world with an estimated wealth of $14.4bn.
Valued at over $20bn, the refinery, which produced its first sample of petroleum on September 3, 2024, has transformed the dynamics of the downstream sector across Africa and put the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC LTD) on alert.
Dangote’s entry into the refinery market compelled the monopolistic state-owned NNPC LTD to start repairing its long-abandoned refineries in an effort to combat and suppress Dangote’s perceived monopoly.
His 650,000-capacity refinery, which is the largest petroleum refinery in Africa and the 7th-largest in the world, witnessed lots of operational challenges, majorly from the government and those whom he described as oil mafia, who import refined products from Malta, a tiny European country with less than a million population.
Apart from his refinery, Dangote is also the owner of Dangote Petrochemicals, the largest fertilizer producer in Africa. It has an annual production capacity of 3 million metric tonnes of urea.
Besides breaking the NNPC’s monopoly, which prefers importing over fixing local refineries, the Dangote Refinery has also impacted European refiners that Nigeria and Africa relies on for refined product imports. The decade long petroleum products imports from Europe to Africa is valued at $17 billion per year.
Dangote Refinery is already exporting refined petroleum products to some African countries, including Cameroon, South Africa, Angola, and Ghana.