This is Nigeria’s leading “AI company”* and it inspires: “Okomu Oil Palm Company Plc has recorded its highest-ever net profit of N39.9 billion in 2024, a staggering 94 percent increase from the N20.6 billion it posted in 2023, positioning the firm as one of the clear winners in Nigeria’s fast-rising palm oil sector, which is quietly turning into one of the country’s most profitable agribusiness frontiers.”
Good People, America may have its OpenAI and ChatGPT, but Okomu Oil is our “AI company” and it is showing where Nigeria’s alpha moments can come right now. Nations rise at different levels. In the 1900s, America’s most valued company was US Steel, and it ran the market then. Fifty years later, they moved from steel to mainframe computers as IBM ran the show. By the 1980s, GE and Jack Welch brought the age of conglomerates with a fusion of making things and modelling finances at scale.
But never forget the greatest postulation of Pythagoras: the universe is numbers. Quickly, the age of Apple, Microsoft and knowledge companies began at scale. But they played within the framework of the innovation society. New species of companies like OpenAI and Anthrophic are taking America into what I have called the accelerated society age. Look deeper, it is making better sense of the world via numbers through artificial intelligence. If you understand your numbers, you understand your universe! That was what Prof Ashiegbu taught me in my first year of college in FUT Owerri, as he explained the Great Debate.
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But just as America laboured in the age of steel, Nigerian entrepreneurs need to understand where the value is right now. Okumu Oil reminds me of one of our startups, Winich Farms, which generates tons of money. Yes, do you want to grow as fast as OpenAI? Be like Okomu Oil because that may be what Nigeria needs right now…and not another app.
*sure, Okomu Oil is a palm oil firm, and not an AI company. I am drawing the analogy mainly on the growth of the company which mirrors what we have in AI companies in America.
Okomu Oil Nets Record N39.9bn Profit in 2024 as Nigeria’s Palm Oil Sector Becomes the New Gold
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