Beyond the exodus: The other side of Nigeria’s investment story

Nigeria’s corporate exodus story is now familiar, with ride-hailing app Uber’s September 2nd exit, after twelve years in the market, the latest. Recently, hypermarket giant Shoprite has wound down its stores, Procter & Gamble has shifted to an import-only model, and GlaxoSmithKline has folded its local operations into a third-party distribution arrangement.

Diageo agreed in June 2024 to sell its majority stake in Guinness Nigeria to the Tolaram group, a deal that closed the following year and ended seven decades of direct ownership. Each departure feeds a wider narrative about an economy that repels long-term foreign capital.

The narrative has a hole in it. A smaller, less-discussed group of foreign-backed companies keeps doing the opposite, writing bigger cheques for Nigeria through the recessions of 2016 and 2020, currency crises, and infrastructure gaps that gave other multinationals their rationale for exiting.

Unilever, Nigerian Breweries, Lafarge Africa and MTN Nigeria span four different sectors and four very different histories, but each has, in recent memory, made its largest financial commitment to the country in years. Their record complicates the exodus story, which deserves to be told on its own terms.

Unilever’s Nigerian business is the oldest of the four, established in 1923 and now the country’s longest-serving manufacturing organisation, a milestone it marked with a centenary in 2023. That anniversary landed amid the naira devaluation that gutted import-dependent manufacturers, and the two years since have tested whether a century of presence was sentiment or strategy.

The 2025 numbers read like an answer: revenue up 43 per cent to N214.3bn, operating profit more than doubled to N42.2bn, and over 60 per cent of raw materials now sourced locally, supporting a supply chain that serves more than 10,000 farming households across the country. While the centenary may have been a marketing moment, the sourcing numbers reflect real commitment.

Nigerian Breweries, incorporated in 1946 and pouring its first bottle of Star lager in 1949, tells a similar story with a sharper before-and-after. At a media parley marking its 75th anniversary in November 2021, then Managing Director Hans Essaadi disclosed that the brewer had invested about N78bn in sorghum and cassava cultivation over the preceding five years, N20bn of it in that single year, buying directly from smallholder farmers rather than importing barley.

Two years later, the bet was tested: Nigerian Breweries posted a N106bn loss in 2023 as the naira’s devaluation tore through import-dependent manufacturers.

By the first half of 2026, the company had returned to profitability, cleared its interest-bearing debt entirely, and generated N73bn in free operating cash flow. That is what staying looks like in financial statements.

Lafarge Africa’s version of commitment looks different, because the company that first built a cement plant at Ewekoro in 1959 is not, technically, the same multinational that owns it today. In 2025, Huaxin Building Materials Group, a Chinese conglomerate, completed the acquisition of an 83.81 per cent stake from the departing Holcim, the Swiss-French group that had controlled the business for years.

The plants, the jobs, and the appetite for spending did not change. Lafarge’s 2025 revenue rose 53 per cent to N1.07tn, operating profit more than doubled to N392.1bn, and the company cleared its loans and borrowings entirely while lining up a $250m investment to add 4.5 million tonnes of annual cement capacity at its Ashaka and Sagamu plants. If Unilever and Nigerian Breweries show what it looks like when a multinational stays, Lafarge shows something slightly different and arguably more telling: when one multinational leaves Nigerian cement, another one buys in and doubles the bet.

MTN Nigeria is the youngest of the four and the most recent of these companies to back its confidence in Nigeria with numbers. The company began commercial operations in August 2001, when fewer than a million Nigerians had a working telephone line. In July 2026, Nigerian Communications Commission data showed MTN crossing 100 million subscribers, the first operator in the country’s history to do so, holding 51.76 per cent of a market that has grown to 195 million active lines.

Its audited 2025 results show why growth held even through a currency crisis: capital expenditure, excluding leases, more than doubled to N1tn, with a capex intensity of 19.3 percent, absorbed in the same year the company was still climbing out of a N400.4bn loss posted in 2024. Profit after tax rebounded to N1.1tn, free cash flow reached N1.2tn, and dividends resumed in October 2025 with a N5 interim payout followed by a N15 final, bringing the year’s total to N20 per share.

The pace has only picked up since. Half-year results released in July 2026 showed profit after tax up 70.6 per cent year-on-year to N707.5bn, and the board approved a N26 interim dividend, a gross payout of N545.9bn, paid on 7 September 2026. That single payout sent a further N54.6bn to government in withholding tax alone, on top of what MTN pays directly in corporate tax, with most of the remainder flowing to a shareholder register thick with Nigerian pension funds and retail investors who bought in at the 2019 Nigerian Exchange listing.

What connects the four is a specific kind of stubbornness that led them to keep spending capital under the exact conditions that gave other multinationals a rationale for exiting. Three of the four are listed on the Nigerian Exchange, giving Nigerian pension funds and retail investors a direct stake in what they build. The fourth, Lafarge, changed foreign ownership entirely and still expanded. That pattern says more about long-term commitment than any statement of intent a company might issue: capital keeps arriving, or staying, at the exact moments when the easier and cheaper decision would have been to pull back.

The macro context helps explain why the bet might pay off, at least on paper. NBS data show real GDP growth of 4.43 per cent in the second quarter of 2026, the fastest pace in five years, with the non-oil economy still accounting for the overwhelming share of that output.

The Chief Executive of the Center for the Promotion of Private Enterprise, Dr Muda Yusuf, struck a more cautious note earlier in the year, saying key macroeconomic indicators were improving, but gains remained constrained by structural challenges, including high energy costs, weak consumer demand and insecurity. Unilever’s presence alone now spans more than a century, and Nigerian Breweries, Lafarge and MTN have absorbed the same structural problems for decades, then kept building anyway.

Debates about the companies that left, Uber included, are legitimate, and the currency losses and cost pressures that forced those decisions deserve honest scrutiny. But any verdict on Nigeria as a destination for patient capital has to reckon with the full picture, and the full picture includes a century-old consumer goods maker, an 80-year-old brewer, a cement plant now on its second foreign owner in a decade, and a telecom operator that doubled its network capital expenditure to a trillion naira in a single year, then followed it with the largest dividend in its history.

Segun Adeyemi, a financial commentator and journalist, writes from Abuja