In 1917, the largest publicly traded company in the United States was US Steel. Fifty years later, in 1967, the largest recorded was IBM. Over those fifty years, American leading companies had transmuted from building and construction infrastructures to digital infrastructure companies. Before those, food companies were dominant. Today, the largest US publicly traded companies are knowledge companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft.
Simply, the US has moved from fundamental infrastructures to creating wealth on numbers (yes, data) just as Greek philosophers had postulated many centuries ago. I expect in 50 years for the leading companies to become firms where the knowledge creation is autonomous, with artificial intelligence, unbounded by pure human capabilities. In other words, dynamic numbers!
In Nigeria today, we are at the phase of that 1917 and 1967 as we are still building the constructing and core digital infrastructures with MTN, Nestle and Dangote Cement leading the stock market.
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Looking deeper, the knowledge era has not arrived at scale in Nigeria. It will come, but it may take a few more decades looking at the unfolding paralysis ,since the companies which will anchor that future are not even Nigerian even though they do everything in Nigeria. Yes, they are legally Delaware (USA) companies with 100% of operations in Nigeria. That is Nigeria’s lost economic future, and will be more devastating than the impacts of dried crude oil wells.
Top Nigerian companies by market capitalization, July 2022
This is the roll call, according to Nairametrics.
- #1: Airtel Africa – N7.16 trillion
- #2: Dangote Cement – N4.52 trillion
- #3: MTN Nigeria – N4.07 trillion
- #4: BUA Cement – N2.35 trillion
- #5: Nestle Nigeria – N1.00 trillion
- BUA Foods – N914.4 billion
- Seplat Energy – N841.8 billion
- Zenith Bank – N649.9 billion
- GT Holdings – N584.2 billion
- Nigerian Brew – N392.1 billion
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Comment: Good point Ndubuisi Ekekwe, but part of the collateral damage is the high level of unemployment in the former manufacturing hubsof the USA that gave rise to the xenophobic followers of Trump.
Those manufacturing industries died in the USA and resurfaced in China, and LATAM countries. We must not allow the rise of knowledge industry kill off the manufacturing sector. That is what China is doing and reason for its consistent growth in the past 20years.
With the impact of the war between Russia and Ukraine, we now know that the knowledge industry means nothing without the agriculture and manufacturing industry. We must continue to champion the simultaneous growth of both industries.
My Response: Great point but knowledge companies do not mean lack of manufacturing. Tesla is a knowledge company. It sells tons of software licenses via vehicles (you cannot resell your Tesla with the licenses; the new owner has to re-license). Amazon is one of largest employers in America with 1.2M workers; it powers many small manufacturers across America.
Your argument was made in the 1790s when farmers rejected the notion that tractors were good since they would kill jobs. Foxconn, which makes things for Apple, is worth about $70B; Apple which depends on it, is worth $2.6 trillion. Many activists will prefer Foxconn which employs close to 1million people to Apple which employs say 40k directly but indirectly more than 5 million apps makers. I do think the activists are wrong!
Knowledge will run empires; Apple is a better company than Foxconn on all metrics. For you to thrive on knowledge, you have won the infrastructure as that is at the top of the pyramid. The US does not have a “high level of unemployment” to my knowledge; the problem today is that we have few people to employ. The complainers are troublemakers who find excuses to cause trouble.
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We will catch up, and there’s a plan on how we will do it, don’t worry about where the current startup are registered; there will always be new companies forming and disintegrating.
We can shorten the pathway within two decades, and the quickest route will be via investment in education. This is not your typical political yammering on investing i education, no, I am talking about private sector investment in education.
There was a time foreign juice was a thing here, but that’s no longer the case; there was a time foreign rice was a thing here, but that is already fading. The new maniac? Foreign education and healthcare. We will soon get to where foreign education will no longer be a thing here, and that is when you will see new type of local startups with funds that no longer demand that you register in Delaware or move over to Silicon Valley. That kind of education is what we are currently working on, and when we are done, it will set a new basis in what tertiary education should be across Africa.
Right now what is holding basic education from collapsing here are the private schools, in the next decades, most of the kids in the universities will be products of private schools, and most will likely attend private universities.