Ladol, a logistics hub for the offshore oil industry in Lagos, Nigeria, is mulling a stock-market listing and corporate bonds to expand its facilities and get more business from major production companies. Family-owned Ladol, where Samsung Heavy Industries Co Ltd is completing the construction of one of the world’s largest floating oil platforms for Total SA, will look to raise capital over the next two years, according to its managing director.
“We are very open” to tapping public equity and debt markets, Amy Jadesimi said in an interview on May 22, without disclosing how much she wanted to issue. “The Nigerian Stock Exchange has done a lot to restructure in the last few years to make themselves attractive to a company like ours, so we will definitely consider that. We will consider listing on the bond market too.”
Ladol aims to build more infrastructure on its roughly 100-hectare (247-acre) free trade zone on an island across from Apapa, Lagos’s main port. That includes roads, quay walls and fabrication equipment, according to Jadesimi, a trained doctor and Stanford graduate who used to work on mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The company wants to attract manufacturers outside of oil and gas, including in the railway and aviation sectors, she said.
Total’s $4 billion Egina floating production, storage and offloading vessel is docked at Ladol. Construction of the FPSO, which is designed to hold 2.3 million barrels of oil, began in South Korea, before it was shipped to Ladol in January for the final stages. It is scheduled to set sail in July for the Egina deepwater field, which is about 80 miles off the Niger River delta coastline and will produce 200,000 barrels a day. The project is seen as a test of the Nigerian government’s drive to build an oil-services industry and get more international companies to use local support firms.
Previously, Samsung and other shipbuilders would have done all the work outside of Nigeria, Jadesimi said from her Lagos office. “This is a massive industrial project,” she said. “The impact this has in terms of Nigeria being seen as a place where you can carry out challenging, high-value projects is really important. It’s critical to show we can do it.” Jadesimi, whose family and other investors have put about $500 million into Ladol in the past decade, said the firm would probably seek to work on two more upcoming FPSO projects: those for the Bonga South West and Zabazaba-Etan fields, both off the coast of Nigeria. Royal Dutch Shell is set to make a final investment decision on the former this year, while Eni SpA will develop the latter. Each FPSO will pump about 150,000 barrels daily, almost one-tenth of Nigeria’s current crude production of 1.8 million barrels a day.
“We are waiting and hoping in the next month or two to have a clearer indication of what is going to happen with those,” Jadesimi said. “If they are delayed, we can look for smaller projects. If not, we will probably be tied up with them straight away.” Chinese importers seeking alternative sources of sorghum as risks of a trade spat with the U.S. linger are finding Nigeria, the world’s second-largest producer, unable to fill the gap as violence in producing regions leave fields idle. Sorghum is a drought-resistant grain used in the food and brewing industry as well as livestock feed and a staple in parts of the world.
