A Firmer Number Than the Order Book Suggested
The ₦5.85 trillion figure is the first compiled tally of what investors actually submitted, and it deserves more weight than the estimates that circulated while the offer was open. As the offer closed in late October, reports based on people involved in the transaction put orders from Nigerian investors alone at roughly ₦6.4 trillion. Final subscription data, covering applications worldwide, have now settled lower than that early order book suggested, at about ₦5.85 trillion. The gap is a reminder that headline demand during a live offer is a marketing number as much as a measurement, and that the allotment statement, when the regulator approves it, is the only version of this story that fixes how much money the refinery actually raised.
Even on the firmer number, the scale is without precedent in the Nigerian market. Demand of ₦5.85 trillion for a single equity offer is close to three times the ₦2.15 trillion sought, and the applicant count of close to 3.8 million dwarfs the participation in any previous Nigerian share sale. The 650,000 barrel per day refinery in the Lekki Free Zone, the largest single train refinery in the world, was sold to investors as a piece of national infrastructure rather than a conventional industrial stock, and the geographic spread of applications, from 120 countries, shows that framing travelled well beyond Nigeria.
