Nigerian cocoa magnate Kayode Ogunsua ships 20,000 tonnes a year and owns $30 million FCMB stake

Kayode Ogunsua learned the cocoa trade from his mother, who bought and sold beans in small quantities, while he was still an undergraduate at Ondo State University in the late 1980s.

He now runs one of Nigeria's largest privately held cocoa exporters from Akure, and the company owns a slice of a Lagos bank. Olatunde International Ltd holds 3,427,842,742 shares in FCMB Group, an 8.01 percent stake disclosed in the bank's latest annual report. At Monday's price of 12 naira, the holding is worth 41.13 billion naira, about $29.6 million at 1,390 naira to the dollar, according to Billionaires.Africa calculations.

The timing has helped. Global cocoa prices reached record levels through 2024 and 2025 on poor harvests in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together supply most of the world's crop, and Nigerian exporters selling into that shortage have seen naira revenues rise sharply.

From less than a tonne

Ogunsua graduated in 1989 with a degree in biochemistry and went into commodity trading rather than into a laboratory. He formed his first company, Kayog Nigeria Limited, in 1991, and took over Olatunde International as managing director in 1995, a year after it was incorporated.

The company started as a licensed buying agent handling less than a tonne of beans. It now ships more than 20,000 metric tonnes a year.

What Ogunsua built in between is a procurement and logistics operation rather than a processing business. Olatunde runs warehouses across the producing states, equipped with drying machinery, and a research department that handles traceability and certification of the farms it buys from, which international buyers have made a condition of sale.

The decisive move came in 2011, when the federal government approved his Akure warehouse as an export bonded warehouse and inland dry port. Containers can now be stuffed at the warehouse under customs supervision and moved straight to port, cutting out a stage where Nigerian exporters routinely lose time and product at Lagos terminals.

Akure sits in the state that grows more of Nigeria's cocoa than any other. Handling the paperwork there rather than at the coast shortens the chain by several hundred kilometres of delay.

The business stays in the family. Ogunsua's son Adekola is executive director for operations and logistics, having started in the trade as a teenager and worked as a field officer at Kayog before joining. Tejumade Ogunsua works in business development.

The bank stake

The FCMB holding is Ogunsua's largest disclosed listed asset, and it sits inside the cocoa company rather than in his own name.

FCMB is among the older names on the Nigerian Exchange. Otunba Subomi Balogun founded it through City Securities in 1977, and his son Ladi Balogun now runs the group.

Nigerian banking stocks have run hard this year, with the NGX Banking Index up 68 percent by early August, after the exchange closed 2025 with a full-year rally of 51.19 percent. Ownership on the NGX remains concentrated in a small circle of founders, controlling families and strategic investors, and those rallies moved a great deal of paper wealth.

Ogunsua sits well below the largest of them. Femi Otedola's First HoldCo stake and Jim Ovia's Zenith holding are each worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Kessington Adebutu's Wema position was valued at $93.9 million in a Billionaires.Africa ranking published in February.

What separates him from most names on that list is where the money was made. The banking and industrial fortunes on the Nigerian Exchange were built in Lagos and Abuja. Ogunsua built his in Akure.