Investments in Nigeria’s noodles market put at $1bn

Girish Sharma, general manager of Dufil Prima Foods, maker of Indomie Noodles has put the value of investments in Nigeria’s noodles market at over $1 billion (about N350 billion).  The market has about 18 players.

Speaking to BusinessDay recently, he said the competitive noodles market has over 20,000 direct employees. Dufil alone employs about 6,000 direct people. “When you look at indirect employment for the industry, then it is in the region of  over 100,000 employees”

According to him, the industry is still open for more players as a couple of entrants would be launching soon.

  He regrets that  despite being a competitive market, the challenge is that players are not investing in growing the category.”If you look at brands, despite the fact that there are many noodles, how many of them are investing on the consumer to grow the category. I think Indomie has been leading the pack. Most players are just looking at how they can put their products out there, which is disappointing. Though some of them are trying to wake up now because they have understood that one brand cannot do it alone”

On whether he is concerned on the generic name of every noodle as Indomie, Sharma said it is really a concern but was comforted that consumers know what they want. “This is why despite playing in a competitive market, we are not losing market share as much as we could have taking in to consideration the number of players in the market”.

Sharma who said that over 80 percent of his company’s production is locally sourced the company which is pro-government policies is forging ahead with backward integration. “The company has been investing in backward integration for a long time. The first move we made in backward integration is setting up our packaging plant, followed by our seasoning plant, flour mill and oil refinery. We have been making a lot of investment in line with the government plans”, he said.

The general manager who said that economic recession had its toll on noodles market as other companies appealed to government to intervene in education because finding skill employees for “our factories is always a concern. What we do is bring expatriates to train our people here. It would be to the success of the country and its growth to invest in the youth to ensure they are trained so that they can add value to the country”, he said.

Daniel Obi