Nigeria has a current population of close to 200 million people. It is estimated that by 2050, Nigeria will be the third most populous nation in the world. From an economic perspective, that’s a huge market and there is a high demand for products that are required by this market.
The Nigerian consumer uses different products on a daily basis. Everything from lotion, toothpaste, soap, clothes, phones to the cars and buses that carry them around and the petrol in these vehicles. All these products are consumed in Nigeria but a lot of these products are not made in Nigeria.
However, a large percentage of finished products in Nigeria are imported from countries that have grown and developed a very competent manufacturing industry. These countries have profited from the developmental benefits that a flourishing manufacturing sector provides. It is difficult to phantom which the extent of the Nigerian industries today. Manufacturing continues to suffer from a low level of technology adoption and lack of financing.
Recent developments in the Nigerian Manufacturing Sector

The economy of Nigeria advanced 1.87% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2020 compared to a 2.55% growth in the previous period, against the backdrop of significant global disruptions resulting from the Covid-19 public health crisis, a sharp fall in oil prices and restricted international trade.
Real GDP growth was estimated at 2.3% in 2019, marginally higher than 1.9% in 2018. Growth was mainly in transport, an improved oil sector, and information and communications technology. Agriculture was hurt by sporadic flooding and by conflicts between herdsmen and local farmers.
The Nominal GDP growth of the Manufacturing sector in the first quarter of 2020 was recorded at 28.47% (year-on-year), or -7.97% points lower than figures recorded in the corresponding period of 2019 (36.45%) but 2.18% points higher than the preceding quarter rate of 26.29%, according the NBS.
Nigerian economy of is changing, and it is shifting from mainly primary based economy reliant on farming and extractive industries such as oil and gas, to one which making more money or GDP from manufacturing or secondary industries and more services in the tertiary sector.
Manufacturing sector in Nigeria has been experiencing a stunted growth and its, contribution to gross domestic product has remained low. Its re-emergent, though currently underperforming, manufacturing sector is the third-largest on the continent, and produces a large proportion of goods and services for the West African region. Nigeria recently changed its economic analysis to account for rapidly growing contributors to its GDP, such as telecommunications, banking to mention a few.
Final household consumption was the key driver of growth in 2019, reinforcing its 1.1% contribution to real GDP growth in 2018. GDP from manufacturing in Nigeria decreased to 1615390.58 NGN Million in the first quarter of 2020 from 1707263.24 NGN Million in the fourth quarter of 2019. Nigerian Industrial & Manufacturing sector accounts for less that 10% of Nigeria’s GDP, with manufacturing capacity utilization remaining below 35% for the most part for the last decade.
Nigeria Bureau of Statistics reports that, small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria have contributed about 48% of the national GDP in the last five years. With a total number of about 17.4 million, they account for about 50% of industrial jobs and nearly 90% of the manufacturing sector, in terms of number of enterprises.
Ensuring economic recovery through manufacturing sector
Meanwhile, the recent policies of government were bringing back confidence in the economy and if effectively implemented. The Nigerian manufacturing sector is dominated by the production of food, beverages and tobacco, with sugar and bread products generating the greatest value of output.
To encourage more output in these and other sectors, the government has made it cheaper for consumers to purchase locally manufactured goods by making the smuggled foreign alternatives prohibitively expensive or totally unavailable through prohibitions. Most manufacturing production is mainly located in Lagos and its periphery, and to a lesser extent some other commercial towns such as Kano and Kaduna, the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics report notes.
Nigeria is blessed with a variety of natural resources. The country is home to a lot of agricultural products and minerals. With the vast amount of raw material in the country, a lot of extra value can be created by converting these raw-materials to finished products. The production of these finished products creates value that resides within the country.
Adoption of new technologies will improve local manufacturers’ productivity
As technology has advanced, manufacturers find themselves not just in need of employees, but employees with a different set of skills. As certain tasks have become automated and machine sensors have become more commonplace, allowing manufacturers to collect large amounts of data, the jobs makeup in manufacturing is shifting. Manufacturers now need employees with a high-tech skill set, proficient in mathematics and possessing an analytical mind. The need for a largely unskilled, trainable workforce that once made up much of the manufacturing is shrinking as technology becomes more prevalent.
Increasingly, the Internet of Things (IoT) is being utilized by manufacturers, with a majority of companies either having already implemented, or in the process of implementing its devices and machines. With these “smart” machines, organizations gather data that can help them implement predictive maintenance and improve productivity. However, gathering the data is the relatively easy part. Aggregating and analysing that data is a little more challenging.
While organizations may have smart machines already on their shop floor, many of them do not have the systems in place to extract and analyse the data being captured by these systems. In this sense, manufacturers are missing out on a critical opportunity: leveraging real-time data on cycle times, quality yields by machines, production run, utilization and other metrics. The entire manufacturing industry needs to improve upon their data mining capacities so they can make faster and better real-time decisions.
Implementing an IoT solution designed to help manage predictive maintenance and analytics as well as remote monitoring can help manufacturers monitor and analyse their data in real-time and help predict when maintenance of an asset is required. As a result manufacturers can move from repair or replace maintenance model with a product and fix the model.
An organization’s customer typically consists of end-customers, partners (or service providers), and sub-contractors, or any combination of these. These customers have different needs, concerns and requirements for working with and interacting with manufacturers. With separate end-customer and partner portals that are connected to a singular source/application, manufacturers can provide every customer with a way to log inquiries, search for knowledge or solutions, request new work requests or obtain updates on work order status. Subcontractors can accept, track, and update work assigned to them, and communicate with the manufacturer through the self-service portal. All of this information could then be stored in the system and available to the manufacturer to support their customers, allowing them to provide timely information to all parties in a digital format.
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