Exploring business opportunities in Brazil

Brazil is a country to do business judging by the second Nigeria-Brazil Business Summit 2013, held in Rio de Janeiro, recently. This is at the instance of Michael Olusegun Akinruli, a Nigerian economist and financial expert based in Brazil. Akinruli is committed to building a strong and sustainable business and cultural relationship between Nigeria and Brazil. His company, Nigeria-Brazil Centre of Business, Culture and Co-operation, the platform he uses for this Herculean project, has become a household name in Brazil.

Highlight

A highlight of the event was a reception given the Nigerian delegation by Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES). Henrique de Azevedo Avila, head of department, Transaction Support in Africa, Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES), warmly received the delegation that included Vincent Okoedion, Nigerian ambassador to Brazil, Robert Orya, managing director/CEO, Nigerian Export Import Bank (NEXIM), Opeyemi Agbaje, CEO, RTC Advisory Services, Shedrack Madlion, Admiral Environmental Care Limited, Kehinde Adeoye, CEO, Kenpee Concerns Limited, Abdul-Alimi Bello, president, Kaduna Chamber of Commerce Industry Mines and Agriculture, etc.

In his opening comment, Henrique de Azevedo Avila said: “We have taken advantage in the past of the fact that Nigeria, through Petrobras, can provide oil and gas products. We also believe Nigerian producers and consumers may also take advantage of Brazilian expertise in producing goods and services.” He added that BNDES has a lot to offer. “But the key activities is for the two countries to know each other better, to know what we can, more particularly, as a financial institution, do, to make services and capital flow more readily, easily and attractively available to you.”

Partnership

According to him, BNDES is very much looking for partnerships in Nigeria. The banks want to get to know individual institutions and to find ways of working together with them.

He explained: “In this, let me assure you it goes beyond more general side of things we want to enhance and promote. We want to originate new businesses. We want to actually seek out effective ways of doing new businesses and generating new contracts for both countries. This is what we want to do.”

Opportunities

Robert Orya, NEXIM boss, was at his best in selling Nigeria, stating “Nigeria and Brazil are the biggest economies in the South South if you take away the Asian countries. Nigeria is a country with 170 million people. We have a sub-region economy called ECOWAS whose population is 300 million; it is made up of 15 states. Nigeria accounts for 170 million, which is 56.6 percent of the sub-region’s population…”

Potential

He added, “… we were set up with that mandate to deepen the other sectors of the Nigerian economy. So, we provide finance, we provide risk-bearing facilities – that is credit warrants and guarantees; we provide trade and market information. And we also find ways of facilitating trade – creating market access for Nigerian exports.”

He further said: “For now, NEXIM Bank has been focusing on manufacturing. We have also been looking at agriculture; especially the agro-processing value chain. Agric is the major driver of our GDP. It contributes over 40 percent to GDP. Despite the fact that we are an oil producing country, oil does not contribute very meaningfully to our GDP. In fact it is the third driver to our GDP. So that will give you an idea of the kind of huge potentials we have in the non-oil sector.”

Solid minerals

He also spoke about Nigeria’s huge solid minerals deposits, which contribute less than 1 percent to our GDP, and its potential in entertainment and tourism which is begging for exploration. Take this: “If with 170 million population that we have, we have a maximum of 60 cinema screens now as against India that has 13,000, that will tell you that there is huge opportunity that is available in the industry.”

Energy

He called on Brazil to invest in building of oil refineries and in power. Brazil power generation is 121.1 thousand MW, 79.7 thousand MW of which is from hydroelectric plants, 4.3 thousand MW from small hydroelectric plants (SHP), 1.8 thousand MW from wind farms and 32.9 thousand MW from thermoelectric plants.

Strategic dialogue

Nigerian ambassador to Brazil recalled that Nigeria and Brazil had established the mechanism for strategic dialogue, which means the dialogue between Nigeria and Brazil be headed by the their vice presidents instead of ministers.

He stated, “The first inaugural session will be held in Brazilia in November. And the foreign minister of Nigeria was here about the middle of last month, to discuss the agenda for that inaugural meeting. One of the issues that will come up in November will be financial co-operation with Brazil. This is because we have been trying to establish financial co-operation with Brazil for quite some time and it has not been taking shape,” the ambassador said. He added “we want it to take shape now because there are many projects in Nigeria. Nigeria is executing a transformation agenda. We have a lot of projects and each project is being taking up by other countries, not by Brazilian firms.

He continued, “As at today, Nigeria has been able to get just one Brazilian company, Andrade Gutierrez, into Nigeria. They have now set up an office in Nigeria, but we want more Brazilian companies to come to Nigeria to set up office.”

Co-operation

In response, Henrique de Azevedo Avila said, “We are following Nigeria very closely. We are following the Transformation Agenda which President Goodluck Jonathan has unfolded. I can put it to you that we can actually co-operate at two different levels. There is the government to government level;  where we talk about co-operation in general, and  broader mechanisms, in our case of course as a financial institution, we talk about financials – integrated financial mechanisms. We can talk and should talk about that with the relevant authorities,  at ministerial  levels, at a broader level, if you wish, we will be available to be involved in that.“And I think, however, at the same time, we can operate on phase by phase direct level, where we will be exploring the possibilities that we   have in terms of establishing co-operation with people, individual institutions like NEXIM and other individual institutions – individual businesses in Nigeria, and trying to locate opportunities so that we can bring Brazilian expertise to the table. I am a very firm believer that the best way to learn about each other, to learn how to do business with each other is by doing. Of course we have to acquire information,   we have to talk and walk the talk. I like to stress that we can do a lot by doing, by setting up concrete real operations. And even more than that, if we are successful to generate a signal, we are signalling to Brazilian investors, Brazilian exporters, to those who will be playing  expertise and technology in the various sector here   that well, this is not only discourse, that this is not only an idea, it is something concrete. So that the business people here do feel that they have concrete goals ahead of them, they must know that they need to spend money to get money.”

By: SIAKA MOMOH