Ten shares for N5,250: the Dangote refinery prospectus opens the 700,000-barrel refinery to Nigerian savers, and fills small applications first

On Monday, 14 September 2026, Dangote Petroleum Refinery & Petrochemicals FZE opened its initial public offer: up to 4,100,000,000 ordinary shares at a fixed price of N525.00 each, payable in full on application. The application list closes on Tuesday, 13 October 2026. At that price the offer raises N2,152,500,000,000.00 gross. The prospectus states on its cover that it and the shares have been cleared and registered by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and that an application has been made to list the shares on the main board of the Nigerian Exchange.

The entry ticket is small by design. The minimum subscription is 10 shares, then multiples of 10, so the smallest application costs N5,250. The prospectus defines a Retail Investor as an individual who is a Resident Nigerian or a Non-Resident Nigerian, which puts Nigerians in the diaspora inside the definition. Retail applications are made electronically, through the receiving agents listed on pages 188 to 189 or through electronic channels that include the NGX-Invest portal. A separate route, the African Distribution Channels, is open to eligible investors in other African countries, subject to the laws where they live.

The document gives its purpose in its own words: the offer "is intended to broaden public ownership of the Issuer". The allotment rule is where that purpose takes a concrete form. If more shares are requested than are on offer, the company sets a Full-Allotment Threshold, the largest application that can be filled in full from the shares reserved for that purpose, and "All valid Applications at or below the Full-Allotment Threshold shall be allotted in full." Only the shares left after that are divided among the larger applications, on a basis the SEC approves.

There is also a reward for holding on. Under the Retail Investor Incentive Programme, a retail investor who is allotted at least the minimum and keeps at least 10 shares without interruption for 12 months from the allotment date becomes eligible for one Incentive Share at no additional cost. Keeping them for a further 12 months brings a second one. Two is the maximum per investor. The holding is checked against the records of the Central Securities Clearing System and the register of members, and the reward is reserved for people who bought in the offer itself: shares bought later on the market do not, on their own, make anyone eligible.

What the money buys into is already working. According to the prospectus, the refinery in the Lekki free zone in Lagos was completed and commissioned on 22 May 2023 and became commercially operational in January 2024. It finished performance testing at its original design capacity of 650,000 barrels a day in February 2026, moved to stable full-capacity production across all units from March, and in June 2026 reached test rates of up to 700,000 barrels a day, now its rerated nameplate capacity. The prospectus calls it one of the largest industrial infrastructure investments undertaken in Nigeria, at a capital cost of about US$19 billion.

The site is built to stand on its own. Its products are Euro V-compliant fuels and petrochemicals, including up to 830,000 tonnes a year of polypropylene in as many as 155 grades. A 570 MW power plant on site runs mainly on gas produced by the refining process itself. About 1,100 kilometres of subsea and onshore pipeline and five single-point moorings bring crude in and take products out, and the tanks hold about 4.7 billion litres. On land, products leave through 11 truck gantries with 96 loading bays and a fleet of 10,000 CNG-powered trucks.

It is also an employer. On 30 June 2026 the refinery had 4,778 people on its own payroll, 3,266 of them Nigerian nationals, plus about 400 more working through 16 independent contractors.

The audited figures in the offer summary show how quickly the business has grown. Revenue for the first half of 2026 was N19,134,942 million, already more than the N18,737,977 million reported for the whole of 2025. Profit after tax for those six months was N2,504,432 million.

The proceeds have one job: the expansion meant to double the refinery. After offer costs of N41,492,782,688.91, which the prospectus puts at 1.93 per cent of the gross, the net N2,111,007,217,311.09 goes to growth capital spending. The plan adds about 700,000 barrels a day through a second crude distillation unit and associated units, for a total of about 1.4 million barrels a day, targeted for 2029, at an estimated US$14.3 billion for the whole programme. The offer money is split three ways: N686.5 billion for refinery process units and major equipment, N841.0 billion for utilities, offsites and infrastructure, and N583.5 billion for construction, installation and other works. The three lines add to N2,111.0 billion, as the table states.

In size, the offer is a slice of a very large company. There are 120,128,915,901 shares in issue before the offer, so the 4,100,000,000 new shares would make up about 3.3 per cent of the enlarged total. At N525 a share, the prospectus gives a market capitalisation of N63,067,680,848,025.00 before listing and N65,220,180,848,025.00 at listing. One large buyer has already committed: Pan-African Refinery Investment SPV, incorporated in Mauritius, has undertaken to subscribe for up to the naira equivalent of US$400,000,000, about 25.34 per cent of the offer, under the same allotment principles as everyone else.

For a refinery that was built to make Nigeria less dependent on imported fuel, the design of this offer points the same way: a N5,250 door, a rule that serves the smallest applications first, and a bonus that rewards people who stay. The list closes on 13 October.

What this rests on

The prospectus for the initial public offer of Dangote Petroleum Refinery & Petrochemicals FZE (195 pages), downloaded from ipo.dangote.com on 3 October 2026 and read for this report: the Summary of the Offer (pages 34 to 38), the definitions (including "Retail Investor" and "Eligible African Investor"), the Retail Investor Incentive Programme (pages 65 to 66), and the description of the business, facilities and workforce. Every figure here is copied from the prospectus; the totals were re-added against their parts (4,100,000,000 x N525 = N2,152,500,000,000; gross minus costs = net; N686.5bn + N841.0bn + N583.5bn = N2,111.0bn; 10 x N525 = N5,250).

What this does not establish

Whether the shares will rise or fall after listing; Vero Record gives no investment advice, and the prospectus sets out its own risk factors on pages 134 to 155. The size of the Full-Allotment Threshold, which the company will set and publish in the allotment announcement. The listing date. The Incentive Shares still depend on corporate, shareholder and regulatory approvals, as the prospectus states.