Ayo Akinfe
(1) Last week, India’s Tata Group increased its stake in AirAsia India to 84% from 51%
(2) Do you know that the Tata Group owns Jaguar Land Rover?
(3) Tata Tea bought Lipton Teabags to consolidate its domination of the global tea market
(4) Tata Steel is among the top producing companies in the world with an annual crude steel capacity of 34m tonnes per annum. It operates in 26 countries with key operations in India, Netherlands and United Kingdom and employs around 80,500 people
(5) Tata Steel was the seventh most valuable Indian brand in 2013 according to Brand Finance. Today, I reckon it is number one
(6) Nigeria is struggling to establish brands. How do you export if you do not have finished branded products?
(7) For me, only three Nigerians are actually putting any effort into addressing this problem – Aliko Dangote, Innocent Chukwuma and Allen Onyema. They simply need to merge their operations
(8) For Nigeria to get off her knees industrially, she needs three or four conglomerates that can deliver say 1m units of a finished product up to international standard. A Dangote/Innoson/Air Peace merger would be the first step in that direction. Such a giant could easily have a market capitalisation of around $500bn, larger than Nigeria’s GDP
(9) Our pastorprueners merging their financial arms to create a Man of God Plc would offer another option. A company whose board consists of Oyedepo, Adeboye, Oyakhilome, Okotie, Joshua, Ashimolowo, etc would easily be able to raise $50bn on the international money markets. I would also like to see it floated on the London, New York, Frankfurt and Tokyo stock exchanges
(10) Maybe if the privatised the NNPC too we could turn it into an industrial conglomerate with its fingers in many pies that could compete with the likes of the Tata Group. It should acquire airlines, steel companies, automobile companies, food processing firms, etc
