Export market presents opportunity for start-ups

Nigerian start-ups and small businesses can explore the export market, which currently presents huge opportunity to earn the sought-after foreign exchange.

Nigeria has a number of exportable commodities such as packaged foods, vegetables, manufactured products and minerals.

Data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show that Nigeria exports cocoa, rubber, live animals and animal products, vegetables, beverages, prepared food stuffs, as well as raw hides and skins.

The country is also reputed for the export of prawns, crayfish, works of arts and antiques, wood and wood articles, ceramics, tin and coal, among others.

Though there is a decline in Nigeria’s non-oil exports due to vagaries in the global market, exporters still earned $270.65 million from cocoa in 2015, according to data from the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria Export Group.

Exporters of oil seeds and grains earned $182.76 million, while those who exported tin got $46.8 million last year. Similarly, exporters of footwear and the like earned $20 .2 million, while those of fertilizers got over $24 million within the year.

Out of N1.3 trillion total exports in Q1 2016, cocoa worth N46.7billion ($153million) was shipped out to Europe and the United States. In fact, cocoa is Nigeria’s flagship export product at the moment.

Cocoa is mainly needed by the Netherlands, the United States, Spain, India, Germany and many other parts of Europe. In fact, many cocoa exporters told Start-Up Digest that they were making more money now than before owing to naira-dollar exchange rate differential now.

A number of packaged food products are exportable to the United States. For instance, Nigerians in the United States eat a lot of noodles. Indomie, for instance, made $30 million from exports mainly in the USA in 2013,  according to a 2014  announcement made by Deepak Singhal, CEO at Dufil Prima Foods, producer of Indomie noodles.

Companiies like Primlaks Nigeria Limited export well-processed and packaged frozen yams and plantains to the United Kingdom. That is its sole business and it does not record losses.

According to Tunde Oyelola, bathroom slippers from Nigeria are highly sought-after in Burkina Faso. Leather shoes from Nigeria is also in high demand in Cameroon, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and São Tomé and Príncipe. China also needs Nigerian leather, which is considered better than peers in Africa, shoe makers in Aba, Abia State, told Start-Up Digest.

Vegetables from Nigeria, when well-packaged, can be exported to Europe, China and India.

Exporters say foods and textiles from Nigeria are ‘hot cakes’ in countries with high Nigerian population such as the UK, the US, Germany, Spain, India, among others.

In spite of these, experts warn that small-scale exporters must first find out the requirements, rules and specifications for each market.

Failure to abide by the regulations of each country can lead to disqualification, which is one big challenge facing beans and fruits exporters to the European Union.