Builders in Nigeria Business

Sunbeth Group, a commodity trading business, recently acquired 73.29% shareholding in Livestock Feeds from UAC of Nigeria Plc ( the former owners) in an all-cash transaction valued at N19.5 billion, which Sunbeth is expected to pay from its cash flow.

Livestock Feeds, originally founded by Pfizer in 1963, was a struggling business until UAC acquired it in 2015 and repositioned it.

11 years after, Livestock Feeds had bounced back from death and is now a thriving business.

Last year, Livestock Feeds Plc reported a full-year 2025 revenue of ₦37.76 billion, marking a 9.4% decline from ₦41.67 billion in 2024.

The company also reported a Gross Profit: 2.33 billion (sharp drop from ₦6.43 billion in 2024)

Operating Profit was 374 million (down from ₦4.70 billion)

UAC Nigeria felt that the watch over the livestock feeds company was over and so wants to exit.

Sunbeth, which is being run by now 30-year-old Nigerian Olasunkanmi Owoyemi, is buying it and will pay 19.5 billion naira for the acquisition.

Sunbeth, the new owner of Livestock, feeds no small even though they are not a popular brand in Nigeria.

Sunbeth had a total revenue of 600 billion last year, exporting cocoa, cashew and other crops from Nigeria to the buyers abroad

In 2024, Sunbeth Global Concepts, run by now 30-year-old Nigerian Olasunkanmi Owoyemi, exported cocoa worth $152 million, making it Nigeria’s eighth-largest non-oil exporter.

For proper context, Owoyemi's business made more income from exporting cocoa than Dangote Cement did last year from their export business.

Happy to see builders in Nigeria betting on the country, building and investing in the future of our country.

Inspite of Nigeria and not because of it

From an Almajiri to a billionaire, the inspiring story of Isa Gerawa, who is the richest man in Jigawa State.

In 1965, Isa Muhammad Gerawa's father took him from their village in Jigawa to an Almajiri school in Kano, the traditional Islamic education system.

He spent four years there learning the basics of Islamic studies.

By the fourth year, he'd lost the pan he used to beg for food.

He never told his father, but that was the moment something shifted—a decision to build a different life, quietly, without permission.

He hopped on the back of a truck to Lagos in 1980.

On getting to Lagos, he served as a tea boy & later a street hawker in Lagos.

He hawked daily from Mile 2 to Alaba.

After several years of toiling in Lagos he went back to the North to try his hands on other endeavours,

He learnt how to mill groundnut oil locally,
After which he worked for other millers to raise capital to set up his own small-scale mill,

He ventured into crop farming, trading farm produce from the hinterlands to cities & poultry.

What followed was 37 years in industry, gradually moving from contracting and trading into manufacturing and agriculture.

There was no dramatic breakthrough moment, no single deal that changed everything—just decades of incremental moves, each one preparing him for the next.

In 2015, he formally established the Gerawa Group, the vehicle that would finally bring all those years of trading experience into one industrial ambition.

His biggest bet was refusing to stay a trader. Rather than simply farming rice and soybeans and selling the raw commodity, Gerawa invested in the infrastructure to process them locally—building what he described as the biggest single oil mill in West Africa, a 1,200-tonne-per-day soybean solvent extraction plant in Kano's Tokarawa Industrial Estate, complete with 10,000-tonne soybean storage silos and 15-million-litre oil silos.

He didn't stop there: two rice mills, one at 400 metric tonnes and another at 560, now produce a combined 960 metric tonnes of rice per day—enough to make Gerawa one of the few operators in Nigeria supplying more paddy than his mills can consume.

The name of his rice is called Gerewa rice.

The jobs number tells its own story: the oil mill alone created roughly 5,000 direct jobs, and the rice mills brought thousands more.

In 2023, Leadership Newspaper named him Business Person of the Year—recognition for a man who, six decades after being sent to an Almajiri school with nothing but a begging pan, now supplies the infrastructure that feeds Northern Nigeria.

He didn't inherit an empire.

.

He processed his way into building one.