Growing bigger is becoming a liability for Nigerian businesses
Walk down any busy Nigerian street, and you are walking through an economy. Someone is welding a gate. Someone is sitting behind a POS machine under an umbrella. Someone is running a kitchen out of a front room and feeding half the street by lunchtime. The country’s reputation for enterprise is not flattery we pay […] The post Growing bigger is becoming a liability for Nigerian businesses…
Nigerian businesses, numbering around forty million, face a challenge of growing too large, as smaller enterprises dominate the economy. Only one in every 745 businesses is medium-sized, with a real payroll and balance sheet. Small firms provide 88% of employment and contribute to nearly half of the national output, but generate only 6% of exports.
Medium-sized firms are where an economy learns to do things properly, yet they face challenges such as finance, crime, and corruption. The cost of becoming visible, including security and taxes, is a significant burden for larger firms, with crime being the biggest obstacle for 21% of them. Small firms struggle the most with getting finance, but larger firms have largely overcome this issue.
The transition from being a small, informal business to a medium-sized or larger company reveals that the challenges change, and crime becomes a more significant issue for larger enterprises.
Written by urgent.news from Nairametrics's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
