Aliko Dangote is eyeing Ethiopia's new stock exchange, and his refinery IPO could make history there too

Aliko Dangote is not content with listing on one African exchange. He is building something that reaches the whole continent, and Ethiopia is now in the picture.

Africa's richest man has signaled interest in listing a portion of the Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals FZE on the Ethiopian Securities Exchange, according to ET Securities, the Addis Ababa-based financial platform. The move would extend the pan-African initial public offering he has been assembling since early 2026, and would represent the most significant listing on Africa's youngest bourse since it opened in January 2025.

The ESX was established to support Ethiopia's shift from a state-led economy toward a more market-oriented system, with a mandate to mobilize domestic savings and direct capital into investment-heavy sectors. It has four listed companies as of late April, the most recent being Awash Bank SC, Ethiopia's largest privately owned lender, which listed 37.9 million shares on the exchange last week and became the most substantial debut on the bourse since its launch.

Dangote's potential inclusion would dwarf anything the ESX has seen. The refinery is valued by analysts at between $40 billion and $50 billion. The planned IPO would float between 5% and 10% of the business, with the primary listing targeting the Nigerian Exchange between June and July 2026 and secondary listings across participating African exchanges to follow. An ESX listing would place one of the world's most valuable industrial assets within reach of Ethiopian investors who currently have limited access to hard-currency-yielding assets.

That last point is not incidental. Dangote has built a specific feature into the IPO structure to address exactly this problem. Investors would subscribe for shares in naira but would have the option to receive dividends in US dollars, drawn from the refinery's projected $6.4 billion in annual export revenue. In a market where local currency fluctuations erode real returns, the dollar dividend mechanism is a direct pitch to investors across Africa who have historically moved capital offshore to protect their wealth.

The ESX connection fits into a broader framework Dangote has been building with African exchanges. The Nigerian Exchange Group convened the chief executives of five major African bourses in Lagos on April 1, bringing together the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Ghana Stock Exchange, Nairobi Securities Exchange, Ethiopian Securities Exchange and the Bourse Regionale des Valeurs Mobilieres, which covers eight West African countries. The session was explicitly framed as groundwork for the Dangote listing to serve as a test case for cross-border capital formation on the continent.

Frank Mwiti, chief executive of the Nairobi Securities Exchange, who attended the Lagos session and separately visited the refinery in person, described the planned offering as Africa's biggest IPO yet. Dangote, speaking at the Africa Finance Corporation's Africa We Build Summit in Nairobi on April 23, left no ambiguity about the ambition. "There is nothing that can stop it," he said of the pan-African listing plan. "We have done the one in Nigeria and that is why we are taking the bold move."

The refinery itself has added momentum to the case. It currently supplies more than 95% of Nigeria's domestic aviation fuel, has exported refined petroleum products to at least five African countries and has shipped jet fuel to Europe as a swing supplier during the Strait of Hormuz disruption. The asset Dangote is proposing to list is no longer theoretical. It is producing, exporting and reshaping regional energy trade in real time.

Whether Ethiopia's regulatory environment can move quickly enough to accommodate a listing on the IPO's timeline remains the open question. What is no longer in doubt is that Dangote intends the answer to be yes.