🍞 The Other Oil Billionaire

In March 2024, a little-known Nigerian company bought a controlling stake in SIAT, a Belgian agro-industrial company with oil palm and rubber plantations across West Africa. For three decades, SIAT grew more Palm Oil than almost any other player in Nigeria, and with this acquisition, this little-known firm and its founder entered the spotlight as one of the champions of Nigeria's industrialisation drive. The buyer was Rasheed Sarumi, founder of the agribusiness group Saroafrica, a holding company with several businesses in the Agriculture and FMCG industry. The company he took back is Presco, which by most measures is the largest oil palm producer in the country. Today, Presco's market cap is ₦2.4 trillion (about $1.75 bn), and SaroAfrica’s stake in Presco is worth close to $1 billion. Considering the other SIAT assets that were included in the deal- Compagnie Hévéicole de Cavally (CHC), a ~5,500-hectare rubber plantation in Côte d'Ivoire; SIAT's subsidiary in Gabon, a majority stake in Deroose Plants (Belgium, USA, China) and Exotic Plant (Belgium and China); as well as assets the Saro already owned before the deal  Saro Agrosciences, Saro Lifecare, and Gossy Warm Springs- the company’s total assets are well into multiple billions of dollars. Yet this company and its founder have remained under the radar for close to 30 years. 

Oil palm is native to West Africa. For the first half of the twentieth century, Nigeria led the world in its production. In the early 1960s, the country produced more than 40% of the world's palm oil, around 669,000 tonnes a year against Malaysia's 95,000. Then came crude. The crude oil boom of the 1970s, and the civil war before it, pulled money and attention away from Agriculture. Plantations were neglected, replanting stalled, and yields stayed stuck on old wild groves.

Malaysia and Indonesia did the opposite. They imported seeds from West Africa and built economies around processing it: state-backed research, replanting schemes, integrated mills. Between them the two countries now grow roughly 83% of the world's palm oil. Malaysia alone produced 20.28 million tonnes in 2025 and earned $27.5 billion from exports.

Nigeria now ranks around fifth. It produces an estimated 1.5 million tonnes a year against domestic demand of roughly 2.5 million, and imports the gap at a cost that ran into hundreds of millions of dollars in 2025. 

It is the same pattern as crude oil: export the raw material, import the finished product, and give away the value in between. That is the gap a Nigerian-owned, fully integrated palm producer like Presco and Okomu are built to close. And this is what Sarumi’s Saroafrica bought.

Presco is a vertically integrated Palm Oil producer. It grows the fruit, mills it, crushes the kernels, and refines the oil into finished vegetable oil and speciality fats. It runs a palm oil mill, a refinery, a fractionation plant, a kernel-crushing plant and a biogas plant that burns waste fruit bunches for power.

Its marquee asset, the Obaretin Estate, began as a state-owned plantation under a World Bank-backed scheme in the old Bendel State in the 1970s, an earlier attempt to revive the industry Nigeria had let slip. In 1991 the Belgian group SIAT, founded that same year by Pierre Vandebeeck, was brought in to run and expand it. SIAT lifted its stake from 33% to full control by 1997, then listed Presco in Lagos on 10 October 2002, keeping 60% and leaving the rest with about 10,000 Nigerian shareholders.

Under SIAT the company was transformed. It added the Cowan, Ologbo, Sakponba and Ato estates, and revenue climbed from under ₦13 billion in 2019 to over ₦330 billion in 2025.

Having studied Agricultural Engineering at Obafemi Awolowo University in 1991, the same year SIAT arrived at Presco, Sarumi started a company at the far end of the value chain.

Nigerian agriculture was in poor shape, and the multinational agrochemical firms were pulling out. Sarumi founded Saro Pharma and Chemicals to serve the farmers they were abandoning, selling crop protection into the gap they left. The company became Saro Agrosciences, and he ran it for nineteen years.

It is the move he would make again, at far greater scale: go where others are leaving, and buy what they no longer want.

From agrochemicals, Saro Agrosciences pushed into seeds through a joint venture with the pan-African seed company Seed Co, called AgriSeedCo. Then Saro Agro-Allied moved into commodity sourcing and export. Saro Lifecare went into consumer goods and personal care. Gossy Warm Springs took the group into bottled water.

Then, from 2017, came the pivot that mattered: land. Saroafrica moved into large-scale plantations with a 15,000-hectare sugar and ethanol project in Nasarawa, a 5,000-hectare cassava venture in Edo with the Mohinani Group, and a 10,000-hectare oil palm plantation through a new subsidiary, Saro Oil Palm, incorporated in 2019.

By the early 2020s, Saroafrica had built a company similar to what SIAT had built at Presco: plantations, processing and distribution under one roof. What it did not have was scale. Presco had scale.

In 2023, SIAT still owned 60% of Presco. So to control Presco, Sarumi decided to buy the Belgian company.

The buyer was Oak and Saffron, the holding company Saroafrica set up for oil palm, rubber and horticulture. It acquired 86.7% of SIAT from the Vandebeeck family, in a deal agreed in 2023 and completed on 4 March 2024. The rumoured price was around €200 million.

Saroafrica sits behind Oak and Saffron. Oak and Saffron holds 86.7 per cent of SIAT. SIAT holds 60 per cent of Presco. That gave Sarumi an effective interest of around half of Presco, plus SIAT's other African estates in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Gabon.

Presco's audited results for the year to December 2025 were the best in its history. Revenue rose 59% to ₦330.64 billion. Profit before tax climbed 57% to ₦177.9 billion, and profit after tax rose 56% to ₦121.35 billion. Return on equity was above 40% and the board proposed a total dividend of ₦44.66 per share, roughly ₦72 billion returned to shareholders.

Two forces drove it. Global edible-oil prices rose on supply disruptions in the major producing regions. And the naira's exchange rate made local palm oil far more competitive against imports, while lifting the naira value of every tonne sold. Ghana adds a second currency to the mix, with sales there up more than 160% to ₦80 billion.

In 2025, it completed two acquisitions that reshaped the company. It took full ownership of Ghana Oil Palm Development Company, buying the remaining 48% for $124.9 million dollars. And it acquired Sarumi’s own Saro Oil Palm for about $46 million. Together, the deals lifted Presco's plantation base by 37% to almost 60,000 hectares. Most of it was funded by a rights issue, which brought in  ₦237.7 billion and left the company's net debt to equity at a modest 13%.

And the Stock market has taken notice. Presco traded at  ₦ 77 in 2022. It closed 2025 at  ₦1,450, up 18x in three years, and as of Aug 2026 sits at over  ₦2,000. The company is now worth roughly  ₦2.41 trillion, one of a small group of NGX names above the billion-dollar line.

The investment thesis is simple: that with a weakened but stable naira, Nigeria will continue to reduce its import dependency across all industries. It will make at home the palm oil it currently imports, and that its largest integrated producer will capture most of the upside of the switch.

It is a coherent bet, backed by real plantations, real processing and genuinely strong cash flows. And on the day-to-day evidence, the company is being run well, funding its expansion with equity rather than debt and paying out generously along the way.

Sarumi now owns the plantations, the processing and the listed vehicle. Whether that becomes a durable national champion or a tightly held family empire with minority shareholders along for the ride turns on things the numbers do not yet show. By some estimates, the stake is valued at above $1.03 billion as of July 2026.

The empire is real. Saroafrica now runs as a group of subsidiaries across agro-inputs, heavy processing and consumer goods: Saro Agrosciences, Saro Agro-Allied, Saro Lifecare, Gossy, AgriSeedCo, Saro Oil Palm, and the holding vehicle Oak and Saffron, of which Saroafrica owns 65 per cent.

Since the Presco chain came in, the group's own figures put it above 80,000 hectares of plantations and over 20,000 employees across Nigeria and Ghana.

The rise has come with proximity to power. He sits on Nigeria's Presidential Economic Coordination Council and the Presidential Committee on Food Security Systems, seats that put him close to the policy shaping his own industry. Yet most Nigerian’s have never heard of him or the company he runs.

How did this all happen? Gradually…then all at once.

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