Thread by @OlufemiAwoyemi

An insightful extract:

"In the late 2000s, costs in China were climbing at an alarming pace, and Mr. Sun realized he needed to move his factory abroad. But where? He considered Bangladesh, then Uzbekistan. Then a friend told him about Nigeria.

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He went for a five-day visit. “I got off the plane, and immediately all these poor people were asking for money,” he recounts. “But then I realized there were a lot of rich people, too, and although it’s hard to make it in this market, I realized that it’s just as hard for ..
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everyone else as it is for me to make a factory here.”

Back in China, he called a contact at the customs authority and asked him what was the physically heaviest product being shipped in large quantities to Nigeria. The answer? Ceramics.

There is a certain pleasing ..

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aptness that a native son of Wenzhou, the birthplace of ceramics, discovered ceramics as his worldly calling. After that single visit to Nigeria, Mr. Sun devoted nearly $40mn to building a ceramic tile factory there. His factory runs 24/7 and employs nearly 1,100 workers,

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a thousand of whom are locals.

Electricity is unreliable and costly, but business is good. Nigeria, with its relative lack of competition and booming demand, allows Mr. Sun to earn a 7% profit margin, compared with the 5% he earned in China.

In the manufacturing ..

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business, margins are often razor-thin; a 2% bump is substantial. And that is why, in the middle of the Nigerian bush, an uneducated Chinese man could serve us some of the finest tea on earth."

~ Irene Sun's "The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Invmt Is Reshaping Africa"