Cameroonian tycoon Nassourou Issa plans $100 million sugar mill to rival Castel

A Cameroonian businessman is preparing to take on one of the biggest names in African agribusiness, backed by a French bank that is helping fund his challenge to the Castel family's grip on the country's sugar market.

Société Générale is arranging a syndicated loan for tycoon Nassourou Issa to finance a sugar mill designed to outproduce a facility controlled by the billionaire Castel family. Funding from the French lender's Cameroonian unit and local bank CCA-Bank will allow Issa's Nasco Group to begin civil engineering work on the planned $100 million (about 58 billion CFA francs) plant.

The scale of the ambition is striking. Issa said the facility will produce 300,000 tons of sugar a year by 2028, a level that would exceed output at the Castel family's Société Sucrière du Cameroun, known as Sosucam, and top any other sugar refinery in the region. If he delivers on that target, Issa would flip Cameroon's sugar hierarchy on its head within three years.

The timing is telling. Cameroon runs a structural sugar deficit, with Sosucam producing between 120,000 and 160,000 tons a year against national demand estimated at close to 300,000 tons. The shortfall regularly forces authorities to authorize imports to keep shelves stocked, opening a clear commercial gap that a new domestic producer could fill. Issa is aiming to close it.

He is also moving at a moment when Castel's own position in Cameroon looks less settled than it once did. Somdia, the agro-industrial arm of the Castel group, has signaled its intention to withdraw from the market and is seeking to offload the 88.36 percent stake it holds in Sosucam. That sale has drawn interest from other heavyweight names, and the eventual buyer will inherit a business long treated as strategically sensitive given its role in national sugar supply.

Against that backdrop, Issa's plant represents more than a single factory. It is a direct wager that Cameroon's sugar sector is entering a period of upheaval, and that a well-financed local operator can seize ground as the incumbent retreats. Securing backing from Société Générale and CCA-Bank gives the project the kind of institutional weight that new entrants often lack, and it signals that lenders see room for a serious rival to emerge.

The obstacles remain considerable. Building a mill capable of producing 300,000 tons a year is a major industrial undertaking, requiring not just processing capacity but reliable access to sugarcane at scale. Sosucam has spent decades developing plantations across the Upper Sanaga region, and any newcomer must build or secure a comparable supply of raw cane to keep a plant of that size running. Issa's 2028 deadline leaves little margin for the delays that commonly dog large agro-industrial projects.

Sosucam, meanwhile, is not standing still. The Castel subsidiary recently invested in a new sugar-cube production unit at its Nkoteng site, part of an effort to modernize its output and defend its share of the processed-sugar segment as competition intensifies. The company has also pressed for regulatory continuity, warning against liberalization that it says would expose local production to cheap imports from subsidized global producers.

That leaves Issa entering a market that is both hungry for more supply and fiercely contested. Cameroon's sugar deficit gives him a genuine commercial opening, but he will be competing against an entrenched producer with established plantations, brand recognition and the resources of one of the wealthiest families in the beverage and agribusiness world behind it.

The broader significance lies in what the project says about how African industrialists are deploying capital. A generation of homegrown operators is increasingly willing to challenge long-dominant foreign-linked incumbents in sectors from cement to fuel to food, using local banks and international lenders to fund plants that reduce dependence on imports. Issa's sugar mill fits squarely inside that pattern, pitting a Cameroonian challenger against a French-controlled market leader on home turf.

Much now rests on execution. The financing arrangement clears one of the hardest hurdles for any project of this size, but civil engineering, cane supply and construction timelines will determine whether the 300,000-ton target is met. Issa has set out his numbers publicly, and the market will measure him against them.

If the plant comes online as planned, Cameroon could shift from chronic sugar importer toward self-sufficiency, with a locally owned producer at the center of that turnaround. The reshaping of the country's sugar landscape is no longer a distant prospect, and the contest between a rising tycoon and an exiting billionaire family is now underway.

Whether Issa can build fast enough to overtake Sosucam by 2028 is the question that will define it.