Dangote's refinery is heading to the stock market — in what could be Africa's biggest-ever IPO
The Dangote refinery — now running at its full 650,000-barrel-a-day capacity and reshaping Nigeria from fuel importer to net exporter — is preparing a landmark share sale that would test whether African capital markets can price a $50 billion asset.
Nigeria's Dangote Petroleum Refinery, the single largest oil-processing plant ever built on one site, is preparing to sell a slice of itself to the public — in a listing that would rank as the biggest in the history of African capital markets.
Dangote Group has said it plans to float up to 10% of the refinery on the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) later in 2026, with a secondary listing on the London Stock Exchange under review. Aliko Dangote, Africa's richest man and the plant's owner, has set a valuation target of around $50 billion; independent analysts have placed the figure between $40 billion and $50 billion. Even at the lower end, a 10% offering implies roughly $4 billion to $5 billion in stock changing hands — a deal with no precedent on the continent's exchanges.
From import dependence to net exporter
The timing is not accidental. By February 2026 the refinery had reached its full nameplate capacity of 650,000 barrels of crude a day, and its output has already rewired the region's fuel economy. Nigeria — for decades the world's most conspicuous example of an oil producer that imported its own petrol — now supplies the bulk of its domestic gasoline from the Lekki plant and has tipped into net-exporter status, with cargoes reported moving to West African neighbours and beyond. For a country that spent scarce foreign exchange importing refined fuel it could have made at home, that reversal is worth more than any single quarter's export receipts.
The investment case Dangote will put to the market rests on that transformation. A refinery running near full capacity, selling into a domestic market of more than 200 million people and an export market on its doorstep, throws off the kind of hard-currency cash flow that Nigerian-listed equities have rarely offered at this scale. The refinery's petrochemical lines — plastics feedstock and other higher-margin products — add a second engine beyond fuel.
Pricing a $50 billion question
The harder question is whether the NGX, and the pool of institutional and retail capital around it, can absorb and fairly price an asset of this size. Nigeria's entire listed market has historically been a fraction of the refinery's target valuation, which is why the possible London leg matters: a dual listing would widen the buyer base to global institutional investors while still anchoring Africa's marquee industrial asset on an African exchange. Handled well, the sale could deepen Nigeria's capital market at a stroke and hand a template to the next generation of large African issuers. Handled badly — mispriced, or swamping local liquidity — it could just as easily become a cautionary tale.
What is not in doubt is the ambition behind it. Dangote has signalled that 650,000 barrels a day is a waypoint, not a destination, floating plans to roughly double capacity toward 1.4 million barrels a day and stake a claim as the largest refinery anywhere in the world. An IPO would give that expansion a currency — publicly traded shares — and a war chest. For a continent whose industrial story is too often told through what it exports raw and imports finished, a homegrown refinery going public at this scale is a different kind of headline: African crude, refined in Africa, financed on an African exchange.