Billionaire Aliko Dangote goes to China to build a shipping fleet from scratch

Dangote Group will order new vessels from Chinese shipyards, with the first deliveries expected as early as 2029, as it builds a shipping fleet to carry cargo for its refinery and other businesses.

Edwin Devakumar, the group's vice president for oil, gas and fertiliser, disclosed the plan at a closed meeting with members of the Nigerian Chamber of Shipping and maritime regulators in Lagos on Thursday, Sept. 10. He said the company is looking at new vessels and wants to travel to China to negotiate directly with shipbuilders.

The volumes behind the decision are large and growing. The refinery at Lekki already handles 75 to 100 ships a month, about 900 a year. Doubling its capacity from 700,000 barrels a day to 1.4 million, which the group intends within five years, would take that to roughly 1,800 vessel calls annually.

Devakumar called it a lot of tanker capacity.

The rest of the group adds to it. Fertiliser and cement require about 45 to 50 vessels a year, with planned expansions expected to add another 25 to 40 for sugar and around 50 for salt.

Nigeria's own shipping industry cannot supply vessels of the size required. The refinery exports through three single point moorings, offshore buoys that let a tanker connect to a pipeline without entering a port. They can handle ships carrying up to a million barrels, and the largest can load or discharge within a day, but only vessels of at least 155 metres qualify. Anything shorter cannot be accommodated.

Devakumar said the smaller the vessel, the longer the turnaround, and that there is a lack of capacity at that point.

Owning ships would also change which markets the refinery can profitably reach. He used polypropylene, a plastic made from refinery by-products, as the example. Shipping it to Japan on chartered vessels is not commercially viable, he said, but if the group owns the ships and buys the cargo it becomes competitive, and Dangote could deliver products anywhere in the world more cheaply.

China builds most of the world's new ships. Its yards took nearly 67% of the global orderbook in 2025 according to Clarksons Research, a British shipping data firm, and 62% of new orders measured by tonnage. China's own industry ministry puts the orderbook share at 69% and says Chinese yards accounted for 56% of all completed deliveries during the year.

How many vessels Dangote will buy has not been decided, and Devakumar declined to give an investment figure. The group will start with as few ships as possible to meet immediate needs, he said, and nothing has been earmarked.

The refinery expansion driving the demand is being funded partly by a share sale that opens on Sept. 14 and is expected to raise about $1.6 billion.

Nigeria has not had a national fleet for three decades. The National Shipping Line collapsed in 1995 after 36 years in state ownership, and the country now concedes almost all of roughly $6 billion in annual freight earnings to foreign carriers.

Devakumar argued that can change. Nigeria has the cargo and the coastline, he said, and what remains is collective will from the chamber of shipping, the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, government and industry to ensure the ships, the professionals, the capital and the value created by the trade are as Nigerian as the molecules themselves.

Olisa Agbakoba, the chamber's founding president, urged the group to go further and apply for national carrier status, a designation that gives a shipping company preferential access to a country's cargo. Launch a hundred vessels and apply for it, he said, rather than waiting and asking the minister while nothing happens. If Dangote moves, he said, everybody will join and it opens the floodgates.

The operation would begin in West Africa before expanding.