Dangote Cement Plc (DANGCEM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Distinguished guests. Members of the Board of Dangote Cement, distinguished investors, analysts members of the press, ladies and gentlemen, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, where every you are in the world watching this program. It is a moment of immense pride for me for the entire Dangote Group to welcome you to this historic day. Dangote Cement Plc on the London Stock Exchange, the world's most international capital market. This is more than a listing a landmark moment of African capital to the global markets. 20 years ago, we embarked on a historic vision to make Africa self-sufficient in cement. From one plant in Obajana in Nigeria, we have built the largest cement producer in Africa. 55 million tons of capacity, operations in 11 countries, over 20,000 direct employees and thousands more in our value chain. We have big factories, but more importantly, we have built a belief, believe that Africa can produce what Africa can consume. Today, we take the next step in that journey. Some of you may ask, why London? We have chosen London for three clear reasons. One, debt and trust, London is the gold standard for governance, disclosures and investor protection. By listing on the London Stock Exchange, we are holding ourselves out to the highest global standards. We want to be measured by the best. Two, Blue bar Capita and African growth story. Africa will need to build 80% of the infrastructure it needs by 2050. 1.4 million people need housing, routes, schools, and so on. Dangote Cement will build that future. London gives us access to the long-term capital that understands this 30-year story. The third is the bridge. London is a natural bridge between African opportunity and global investors. I'm particularly delighted that our journey to this market is anchored on our road map of decarbonization program to reduce our carbon intensity by 30% by 2030. This is not just a promise. It is a funded Board-approved plan. Ladies and gentlemen, Dangote Cement comes to London, not as a Nigerian company looking for capital, but as an African champion, offering growth, yield and impact. We offer market leadership in the fastest-growing cement market in the world. We have strong cash flow and a long track record of dividend payments. We have a clear transition plan to green cement. To our new investors, we thank you for your trust. I will not take it for granted. To our existing shareholders, thank you for building this company with us. I will now invite Mr. a Non-Executive Director representing the holding company on the board, to give an insight of the group. Once again, on behalf of the Board and 20,000 employees, thank you all for your trust. It is now my privilege to now open the Capital Market Day. Thank you.

Good morning good afternoon, good evening. My name is I'm the Group Vice President, is one of the two presents in Dangote done. I've been on the Board DCP since 2002. I'll be speaking very briefly about TIL. As a group, we are one of the largest privately owned African industrial conglomerates. And DCP has been a similar part of the journey of the Dangote Group. Just to give a brief outline, we do have different groups within the Dangote. We have the food group that comprises sugar, which is a listed company in Nigeria. NASCOM, Salt is a listed company in Nigeria, and we have the rice that is being incubated. We will have a few things on tomato and dairy down the line from the Dangote Foods Group. Cement on its own will cover basically underestimate from building materials bring it to play. That's another group. Another is oil and gas, which has the petrochemicals refinery and also the fertilizing. In broad form that does what we have respect to our operations. We do have other things around infrastructure, transport, utilities, ports activities to kind of support the activities of the group. We are energy self-sufficient, and I think you'll see more of that in the Dangote story -- Dangote Cement story. We're keen on making sure that we are to generate our own energy at the very least possible costs that helps us to drive our competitiveness. We do have -- we're operate in 17 countries majorly with DCP. We have, in total, about [ 4,000 ] employees across the group. And somehow, we do say a lot about attacks paying ability where the largest stockpile giving us a [indiscernible] scale of operations. In about a year ago, as a group we crafted Vision 2030, of which, of course, DCP is one of the parts of the Dangote Group is part of that journey that we are creating for ourselves. And then that we -- if you look at the plan for 2030 is almost, we say about is about 4x what we have presented last 10 years, to show you the growth trajectory that we have formed for ourselves going to 2030 as a group. We have demonstrated over time executive capacity in creating new businesses that's the story of We're very profitable and cash generation operations. We usually have a cycle for us, and we're in the cycle of us -- of very fantastic liquidity across our businesses. In terms of synergy because we have all these businesses medially within Nigeria, with DCP extending outside Nigeria, the is around what we do we manage logistics across. We provide support the port facilities. Therefore, as a group, we do support a lot of our businesses. Recently, we are currently on a road show trend to list the refinery in London Stock Exchange. And that for us is one of the things that we feel help to generate activities. I must also emphasize here that TIL as a group is in full support of the Board decision DCP to park on this journey to the on London Stock Exchange. We will provide all the support that is required to make sure that DCP achieve their objective. And one of the things we will try to do business plans is to help for this listing on London Stock Exchange. So I must say that, yes, we are a group that is support of this. We'll ensure that whatever is required for most like to make this... Thank you very much. Now I would like to call on Mr. to introduce his team and provide the context with respect to this presentation. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Good afternoon, good evening to whichever part of the world. We have a lot of investors have shown interest, and they joined us by online. So welcome to all of you to this -- our Capital Market Day. I will be running through this lovely story about Pan African Cement Champion, there is Dangote Cement. I'm Erwin I'm the Group Managing Director and CEO of Dangote Cement. I have over 4 decades plus experience in the cement industry which includes my association of 8 years plus in the Dangote Cement. Prior to that, other than Nigeria, I had international exposure by having 5 year strength in South Arabia. Rest of the experience was in India ranging through the various companies, which are listed there, Walsum, Reliance, Adani operation. We are accompanied to this day by our Board of Directors. You already met our Chairman and the DIL Director. We are also complete by Mr. who is our Independent Board Director. To tell the story, I've got some colleagues with me, a very important members of our team. Mr. Gbenga, who has got 22 years plus experience, he's our Group CFO. Then I have Adi Tora, she's our Chief Strategy Officer of DCP, followed by Mr. Murilo Silva, our Chief Logistics for Dangote Cement; and lastly, our Chief of Sustainability, all employees. This is a management team that will take you through the exciting journey that DCP had over the years and what it proposes to take you on going forward. Having said that, let me once again thank all of you and warmly welcome you to this session. We appreciate your time, and we're grateful to that you have made it today some of you physically and many of you online, so we have made a very crisp presentation, which will optimize your time that you're spending with us. And we are basically can be broken in 5 sections. In first section, we run you through the introduction of Dangote Cement to the benefit of some of you who did not have the privilege of exposure to Dangote Cement followed by African generation buildup story. Why do we feel Africa is at the door step of a generation buildup? And under this section, we'll also tell you if -- which our belief, which is founded on multiple dimensions were to come through, which will come through, how DCP is well-equipped, well-positioned platform to be able to take advantage of that. The next session is we'll go into slightly more deep and show us how is replicable business platform that DCP has created over the years. Then we'll have a short break and a Q&A session on some of the issues that you would like us to clarify on the earlier three sections followed by last two sections, which is the midterm growth strategy and financial review. And before concluding, there's one more Q&A session on these two topics. Having said that, let me take you through one short video, which will give you a glimpse of what DCP is in a pictorial form. Can I have the video, please? [Presentation]

Thank you. I'm sure you'll agree is quite exciting. That's why we call it as a Pan-African cement industry Champion. Now it qualifies for Champion because in a very short period from 2007 when we put our first plant in operation in it has slowly grown into leaps and bounds in Nigeria. It's not only contained itself to the Nigeria's expected wings across 11 countries, what you just saw. Not only that, we are progressively already reached a state where we are highest exporter of cement and clinker in Africa. And we intend to take it further, which I will explain in my presentation to take it to the next level, wherein we can qualify to be called as really an export house. Besides this, what we have to present to you in this presentation is we have a unique model, which is mentioned here as quarry to customer. What it really means this is a model in which from the mines you take up from the to take it to the place of use, which is Lori, we have a control on the entire value chain. So in the local language, we term it is, quarry to Lori, which in a technical term, will mean quarry to customer. Besides this, we are also one of the largest employer with almost 20,000-plus employees. And before I move on to the next slide, the one thing that specifically that I would like to put to your attention, which you should carry home from this slide is the -- which we'll talk in detail about it, subsequently is about the sea port facilities. We are a unique cement company to have -- we store the 5 operational ports. And leveraging this asset, we had exported 3 million tonnes last year, and we intend to do much bigger in the coming years. Look at the sheet, it looks like an amazing story. Growth is one part. Scale is another, spreading the geographical reach is another. So what we have been able to successfully do is to combine both with profitability. I'm sure many of you would be tracking cement industry players. And it would be difficult to beat these numbers. When I say this company has been having off-late a CAGR of revenue of 40%, EBITDA CAGR of plus 50% and dividend CAGR of 22%. Not only cement industry, I think in the manufacturing sector, these parameters would be the benchmark. And will not have happened over 1 year. We have been able to successfully demonstrate it, repeat it every year, year after year. And we are very confident the same story will continue in our next phase of this journey. Besides this, what I would like to draw your attention and maybe I'll spend some time on that, is the hard currency economics engineering. Why we call it engineering is because our business is in local currency. Our requirement is in dollars. This is the garima that the cement industry faces. Most of the procurement like AGO, you purchase some of the people prepare imported coal, some of the spare parts, machinery, investment, machinery, anything you name except for the limestone predominantly is dollar based. And in the emerging markets, which have seen a wide fluctuations in the ForEx is very important that the company reinvents reengineers is way of working, wherein we become FX fluctuation immune. And how we have achieved that? We achieved that by geographical diversification. When you have a big bouquet of 11 countries and growing as we speak, there will be expenses when one country may not be able to perform. They'll have these challenges, but the other countries make up. So on an average, we are able to insulate. And of these 11 countries, I would also like to draw attention. Some of them are CFP-based. That mean they are naturally hedged because they are linked to euro. What we also did is we had a massive exercise, which we undertook, which is called as FX neutralization. We looked at both the aspects of the -- our foreign exchange requirement. What is that we bring in and what is that we require to operate our business? What we were bringing in was practically nil because our business was in local currency. We took a very aggressive look at this, and that is when our export journey started. In 3 years' time, we have gone from practically 0 to 3 million tonnes. And this year and going forward, our targets are much higher. What it did it, it brings in the foreign exchange into our business to very large extent. How did we cut down our thing? We used to require dollar predominantly, let's say, for you know that the cement industry, the logistics plays a very important role. So does the fuel. We try to look for whether we can localize these requirements. Can be replace -- It was quite a challenging task for the -- all go to the drawing board and we look at it, what are the options, what are the sense of Nigeria, and that is where we decided, will exploit the gas availability in the country. And we went into a massive program since 2024 to converge all the trucks that we operate from AGO to CNG. Practically, we a huge spend huge amount of dollars to get AGO into the country. Today, practically, we have cut down to almost 1/4 or 1/5 of that. And by 2027, all our trucks are aspired to become CNG base, making our CNG AGO requirement for the cement transportation 0 practically. We also looked at the various fuels that we have alternative fuel. We took up a journey of alternative fuels and trying to do that. And so on and so forth, and we decided that we should be able to cut down very significantly our requirement to all the contracts we looked at it. We went into -- the operations of the plant is stored by OEM by our self team and a number of initiatives we undertook, except for one where we couldn't find a solution, we're still working on it, and that is the gypsum. So only notable import that we do today besides spare parts is the gypsum. Even for spare parts, we could do a lot of localization, whereby reducing our dollar direct component in the manufacturing for around 60% plus to less than 40%. All this together, we reduced our requirement. We increased the generation. What it meant? My colleague, used to be in the market to buy $22 million every month for our operations. I'm not talking of CapEx. Today, he has a surplus of $4 million to $5 million every month. You heard me right, from minus 22% to plus 4%. This has been the turnaround. This is -- again, I'm referring only to the OpEx requirement and that has been a very success story in the recent times for the group. CNG, I've mentioned it separately, though it's a part of FX utilization because it has got multidimensional. Multidimensional meeting besides what I talked about ForEx is also a big cost reduction. Practically, it is 40% of the cost what AGO is. It also helps us in our decarbonation where we have a self-imposed targets even in the absence of regularity requirement. So altogether, and finally, we decided while we are rejigging our way of working. We will also try to invent how do we do the value selling. Where are we selling this, we do cherry picking. We also try to recast our pricing policy, all put together, made our operations. Hard currency today we can say for the operations is being engineered and we do not require anything for the operations. You have seen the video, you have seen me talking, and I think you will agree it is a very exciting and successful story in the cement industry. But this story is not complete without this hero and that hero for me is That is where it was born. The first step that it took was in 2007, where in our first plant started operation. And since then, it has been the backbone of the DCP. I can speak for ever on this that is so close to our heart of each of the DCP employees. But only I'd like to draw you something. We have grown from one plant to five plants. In this journey, what highlights is two, three couple of key points which have been our template across wherever we operate, and that is our success mantra. A, our visionary leadership in the past beside that we will grow, we are not a short-term player. We are a long-term player. We believe we are an African company. We believe in Africa, we love Africa. And for that, when we went into resources, we did not look for one plant, two plants, 3 plants or 30 years, which is normally a norm. We went and looked for 400 years of limestone, 400 years. What it meant is even after 5x expansion, we still have reserve for next 80 years. And that gives us a leverage which is a unique thing. Look at the map. The dark blue shows what are the strategically market, which I think -- caters very efficiently. This is another corner store of DCP strategy is. We will use no fixed template. We'll be flexible. Our only mantra is, we should be the least cost to serve the market. And that is where we then blue, dark blue the market. It covers practically a large part of the country, and that is why it has grown from one to five plants. I talked about some time back of a self-sufficient value chain, et cetera. You've seen many of those examples in what you have talked so far. But if you look at it, it has got in-house, you can be calling this Obajana as a cement city, except China, which is the largest single place integrated plant establishment, it has everything that is required. We do not buy any additive from outside. We don't buy water. We have our own dam. We don't buy electricity, we have our own power plant. Otherwise, just imagine in a country, which generates the power of 3,000 megawatts or to 4,000 that range fluctuates, how would we manage our DCP, the mega world company which is there today with 35 million tonnes, which requires almost over 500 megawatts of power. That means, 1/6 or 1/7 of the country's requirement alone would have been be required for our cement business if we have not gone in for power. So this template I'm referring to remember, it's been followed everywhere. The most important, maybe there are many more things, as I said, I can speak forever on this, is the people that we create here. There is no academic institution which produces cement technologists. And I say this with a lot of responsibility. We make the people who can run the cement business. The people decides on the job training, people whom we take as articials, we encourage them to upgrade their skill sets. We take graduate engineer trainees, we do management trainees, et cetera. And that is what we have been able to keep pace. Otherwise, for this growth, if we were to import people, it would have been next to impossible to be able to run the business. Having said that, let me take a break from that. Let's move on to the main agenda. What differentiates? I've talked about some attributes by the macro level what differentiates DCP from the other competitors. And why we feel it is the right and appropriate to qualify to fulfill the needs of the Africa generation buildout. Besides the compelling macro and micro trends, besides, let's say, keeping aside scale that we talked of, okay, what uniquely think that we are going to talk in this session today is in the six pillar, first two or what I've already talked about is that it is a irreplicable asset. When I say irreplicable, it is not forever. But we are talking about time frame. To get one line or, let's say, to get 35 megawatt, one plant requires keep in mind of our size, $400 million. If we were to create -- somebody has to create this for a 55 million tonne company, and we start today from the concept to the first place, it takes around 4 to 5 years. Development is not going to wait for 4 to 5 years. So we are well placed to capture that now. And for a long period of time, we were irreplicable, so many ingredients like power, like water, the infrastructure logistics that we've created, it is very difficult to create in this short duration of time. Differentiated logics, we'll talk about it. My colleague, will also talk about it. Consistent and above average, above benchmark financial performance. And lastly, we have a system in our organization where under the guidance of the Board, we meet every year to prepare a strategic plan spanning over the next 5 years. That means we are not static. We are always looking ahead. And this is being monitored, -- monitored by the Board. And every year, we revisit that and take what improvisation can be done. And so we have a next -- every time we talk to our team, they will know what is our next goal, what is our next plan in which we are moving. And that differentiates us from a reaction to a well-planned thought strategy that we adopt. Yes. Why we feel Africa is on the generation buildout. I think, my colleague, will do justice to this section. But let me take you the top headlines. If you look at any of the publications that you see across the world, and there is a unanimous decision. And some telltale signs are already there, that Africa is going to be the next builder. It is expected that by mid of the current century, we would have been housing 20% of the world's population. We will be having two cities out of the top 10 cities in the world. And one of them would be and the second will be Tina. Nigeria, if I talk about, which is the greatest economy in the whole of Africa, would be in the top 20 -- if you look at the GDP rates, is telling with what has been sited here. Now if you go to the table, you have N number of statistics, I don't want to run through each line. It's not just one parameter, whether it's urbanization, whether it is growth, whether it's a population growth. And combined with that, see what are the deficits that we have in the infrastructure and the aspirations of this ever-growing population demographic. Africa is getting younger compared to other economies, okay? It's growing. See the deficit that we have in the structure. And most of this, whether is hospital, whether it's a road, whether it's power I talked about them, you cannot be having a growth without power. Everywhere you require cement. And the estimate is that if we have to meet the aspiration of the people, we have to lift up the African people out of the poverty level progressively and do the bare minimum upgradation of this to make it sustainable, an expenditure of around $100 billion would be required. And we are already seeing -- you will see some of this things mentioned in the next There are some corridors and with already foreign investment, the money is flowing in. And we should be seeing $100 billion every year. And if I take cement as 15% constitution, I'm taking a very pessimistic number. Not only all the infrastructure should have around 18% to 20%. That is a business that we are going to have. And that is a business that we should be looking to. That is a vision that the cement industry and we as a leader of the industry, have to plan for. And that is what our next -- going forward in the midterm is our plan for the -- our company. Moving on. When we entered -- when we started our plan. The two things which notably 2007, when we started our first plant in Two things I would like to mention is the price of the cement. Maybe my Board of Directors, some of them may give a more accurate information. But I have been told it was around $250 a tonne. Today, we are far less half of that. To what Dangote has done and the same story go to any part of the country. When we put up our plant in Congo, that time I know we have purchased cement at $265 per tonne. Today, it has come down to around $100-plus. We have made the cement affordable. Next is -- affordable is well, fine, but it should be available where you want. And our scale and our spread in 11 countries, if you look at the map of the Africa has made it possible. So we have made available. Nigeria, which was importing clinker and cement, we have today grown not only to meet the requirement, but to also export -- what a great transition in this short period of time. And what it means is that underlying business model that we adopted was of self-sufficiency. And we want to, besides clinker and cement, we want to export this model to whole of Africa. And some of these footprint that you see some of the trade benefits after and all are trying to implement is being achieved through our means of having same sufficient across the figure. Something structural opportunity which we have with relatively not to the same magnitude and the same complexities others will have is look at the states that we are in. Practically, all the good limestone bearing countries we are there. When I'm saying we are there, I'm excluding the North Africa or -- Africa sub-Saharan Africa. We are there in Senegal. We are there in Congo. We have in Nigeria. We are the name a country, we are there, maybe excluding the exception of Kenya. And by the sheer presence -- of having presented a large magnitude of reserve, which has been our philosophy, we have created a head start over our competitors, and we are almost ready to be able to meet the requirements of the future. Coastal markets, if you look at the map and this -- you don't get any limestone on the coastal at least on the western part of the Africa. It is a sort of opportunity for DCP. Why is this an opportunity? Because with our infrastructure and investment that we have done and the foresight, we have the ports with normally in an emerging market, not only here everywhere else in the world. My experience have been infrastructure becomes the biggest country. We have created for -- which can take out, receive material. We're thereby addressing this, some may call it as an issue, I see that's an opportunity for DCP. We can treat now. So the outlook has changed. We have started looking a whole of Africa as my market. The market in which DCP has to serve. And you see the circular that we've shown, how Nigeria just as an example, and the land connection stores, how we export to our adjourning countries, whereby though we are present in 11 countries, but today, we do business in 24 countries. We have large cement drivers in West and Central Africa, we are there, and we get benefited from the regional trade agreements that we have across the nation. Now this -- after comes, it will further strengthen our sort of opportunity that we'll have, and we are well prepared for that. Putting it into an -- from the products -- from the infrastructure side, we talked about what plant we have or maybe we have what we are building, let us talk about the product. Today, we are one of the exceptions who has a large bouquet of variety of cements. What it means is, any cement requirement which could be a special event requirement, we are prepared to meet. It requires, let's say, high blended cement, not a normal one. We are there. It required road stabilization, we are there. Oil well cement, we have recently added to our portfolio. You name one, we are there, and we are gradually already moving into the adjacencies of cement, which is in ready mix or some of the other area. And lastly, taking forward the concept of self efficiency. Taking into account the generational buildup that we are talking of. We will require cement in a large way, but we also require some other building materials. And we do not have an educate or reliable sources for supply of that. And that is why we move into the bucket we are moving in the direction of that. It also makes a logical extension of our business. We've invested heavily in infrastructure, like I said, your water, your house, your people, everything you name, we are there. It's just a small incremental CapEx basically related to this plant. We have land, we will everything there to add on these capabilities. We have a logistic network, which we'll talk about. We have got a vast distribution network, we'll talk about. That makes it easier for hus in the low transition, better place to do that. So going forward, you will see that DCP has matured from where we were a single plant, single location in 2007 to a multi business which can offer one stop building material solutions. Besides economics, what it does is, it gives us a gain is replicable when I say it gives an opportunity for us to lock a customer from the foundation to roof, F2R, we call it in our company. So everything that is required for a person to move with this family inside this and make it a memorable seamless experience that ambition will be served when we complete that bucket. Going forward, let me go forward. I said we are truly a kind of African champion. I would modify my statement now. I say we are not only Pan-African. We are a global cement champion. Why I say global cement champion? Not only some statistics, I'll put in front of you, and I'm sure at the end of it, you will agree to what I say. If I exclude China, okay, in terms of capacity, we are at the ninth position. I think graph on the left-hand side of the scheme shows that. And if our midterm plan, 2030 plan of capacity, if you look at it. If we grow to 80, which we will grow. And our confidence comes from our excellent project execution capability in demonstrating the complexities which I'll talk in the next half. We are super confident that we'll be there. And with that, we move into the global top 5. This is a very notable achievement but becomes still more -- to make all of us proud is that in this period of our existence, how many companies have waited what capacity? And that is what the graph shows. We are in the top three, which again reinforces that we have and project infusion capability. We have a team. We have our financial resources. And now add to that one more layer of complexity is other two countries or other competitors might have got more number it. But then how many countries they are present? Why that is important? Because each country, each one of the area that we go in, own dimensions of issues, complexities, ecopolitical, macro level, we have the capability to execute things under different bearings instead of being only in the comfort zone. And that we -- if we add up that layer, we are the #2 in the world. So we are not the best global player, but we're in the top 3 to 5 if I add up scale. If I add up the period in which we have grown CAGR, if we add up number of countries that we have grown. Let me slightly go back to slightly more fundamentals. What is this query to customer that we talked about. We briefly I said, we control every value chain that we do. Differentiator is, we do everything ourselves. This came out of both necessity as well as compulsion. When we entered the business, the engineering or the environment in the country was not mature enough, which progressively it is becoming, it is improving. So we have to do everything else. We had to bring their skill set and do it. And then we found we did it very efficiently. For example, my retail give it to a contractor. We don't do it. We are our own people. We do it. So in the first time, bucket is the of inquiries. I talked about the example of -- But as I said, that template runs across all our locations. We have a total excess of 4.25 billion tonnes of reserves. And this is not all the quantity, it is locked up by the long-term contracts and licenses, which practically with the current capacity amounts to around 80 years of requirement. Next, we were blessed with the thing that we came in 2007 where we started our plants in listed 2003 somewhere around that. And all our plants, though the EPC contract has been given to the Chinese, which we feel we are good at. But all the major machineries are European. And if some of you are following the manufacturing companies, you name a company, which is on the top of the league is there, who is our business partner. Whether it is -- Whether it is FIFA, whether it is -- Whether it is [indiscernible] Caterpillar, you name one company, we are associated with them. So what we have, we blended the equipments, and the execution efficiencies of the Chinese. We brought the best of the both worlds. And what we created is nothing but a irreplicable asset, which is very modern, state-of-art, cost efficient, and that is what our one of our advantages. Lastly, distribution and sales. We have a very thought through, a very vertically integrated logic and distribution model, extending up to our customers and people who were to take the product to the point of use of the construction. That's why we say to Lori. What is driving a principle of this and which we designed the whole system with what we call RAS. We feel any efficient distribution or system should be able to reach where the product is needed. You can produce a product. But if you cannot reach where the need is, it will -- your clinker and cement will lie in your silos or you will do some distressed sell to get rid of them. So all our efforts are made to see that we are reachable in even the most difficult part of where our market places. A is availability. We are a firm believer that the product is not visible at the shelf at the counter of our retailers, the customer is not going to wait for it. There will be options. And we -- our decision ensures not only we reach, we ensure that every time the product is available when he wants. And lastly, as is the speed. Even if it is available to make it move to his doorstep, we'll determine whether we can become a supplier of choice. And that is where this whole scheme drives it. We'll talk about it late. Now all these things then maybe across the function, but just giving you an example of the they are fully tack and also community angle. Maybe let me share it we are, besides scale size, et cetera, we are a company with a purpose. And one of our purposes that where we have our communities where we exist, we should be able to see that they also share the benefits. I think in the previous slide, I forgot to point out, the community development expenses in the last 2, 3 years almost tripled up. Similarly, all our customers who have been working with us faithfully working on with us. We have designed a unique model, which I don't think exists anywhere. It's called it the customer truck empowerment. What has it done is, we buy the truck, we bear the interest charges. And our customers, we give the truck, with only condition that he will do business with this truck only for us. What he does? He does it, it fulfills our requirement of RAS, reach actually the -- it also helps us to doing -- seeing that we buy the share of the wallet of the customer. So there is no bond or easy lock, but we have this efficient with our customers. management system, decimate electronic roof, they are all technically enabled processes that we adopt. I think it's here, what I was talking about, social development, if you look at it. The last item on the right-hand side block has grown in 1 year from $12 billion to $19 billion. And if you look at the 3-year spend, it's gone up 3x. So coming to that, I say we do a business, yes, we are in the business of making money. Yes, we are in the business of also making cement, but we also have a purpose of doing a business. And some of these will show that how conscious we are of that. We do not have any regulatory framework in this part of the world to guide us of forces to adopt the decarbonization policy. But then we have been the founder member of GCCA, I have the privilege of sitting on the Board of GCCA, and we have voluntarily adopted -- the scheme which most of the countries were remember, about 80% plus a decarbonation that is reducing CO2 by 20% by 2030. We are, as of now on track. We are in the absolute number basis comparable with emerging and other peers. Having said this, on a global basis, we are also very conscious of the resource utilization. We feel that not only for us but for the mankind welfare. And that's why very cautious of how we officially use it, what are being people say there what is going to the next battle in the coming years to come, consider water, gas, et cetera, everything with conservative, we weighed the option, whether we are making an efficient use of that. And lastly, empowering people. I've talked about how we train our people to the various things. Some of the examples are given it first to row. And lastly, we see that the fruits of our programs is also passed into our community. An example of that, I'll give you a very interesting example. Ethiopia is a very complex country, which all of us know is quite challenging in some ways. And be, as a producer have got a capacity share of 17% around that, but our market share is 31%. 17%, 31%. What it shows is in the adverse can other people are not able to operate their plant, we run our plant in the full capacity. And this is acknowledged by the companies -- the country's top most leadership whenever our official visit the Board Directors visit Ethiopia. We have played a very important role in the transformation of Ethiopia, especially some of you if you have traveled to this, you will find the pace change. And we are very -- it will not be appropriate to say grateful, but they are acknowledging our contribution in that by having producing the capacity and meeting the shipment requirement. And that has been possible because we have a very harmonious relationship with our community. They don't disturb us. Okay. Going to the next -- now logistics, I think I've been talking about this some flavor of what is the guiding principle I mentioned RAS. Now we will be talking more in detail, but let me -- this slide pick up the sea transportation. I think I made a passing remark most of the emerging countries, this becomes a bottle line. A, of the port facility. If it is available, the -- the charges of the ports are exorbitant. Instead of promoting export, it is a different to export. -- is even incoming, for example, I take my ship to Senegal, Ivory Coast, it has to park in the high seas for 15 days. What it means is it means a damage. It means a cost. And by investing in this and not only limiting to what I have put on the slide, it also -- we are continuing to do that as the DCP. We have continued to expand our Apapa port. We have worked a deep seaport coming in overstate. What will facilitate is a big ship arrival at the port. All this put together, gives us a very competitive structural advantage to the DCP in these markets -- market. We have talked about logistics, and if we do not link it up with what benefits it brings to the organization, I think the story would be incomplete. What it does is by a virtue of where we have designed it, the way we have structured it, it is a window by which the capacity that we have been building at a fast rate, and we are future ready by having some spare capacity. It is put to use as and when an opportunity comes, like the export came. It helps us in utilizing the spare capacity whereby not only bringing the top line business also reduces the cost of the company. The economic benefits by virtue of some of the places where we have a trade agreement, it brings additional besides the top line revenue, the benefits under, like, for example, If we take our product we get a relief in the custom duty. Since we acknowledge and we know all of us that logistics is a very important part of our cost, we are very conscious how do we keep on cutting down our costs. And CNG has been a big changeover because we run a fleet of around 8,000 trucks and another 3,000 by our customers. We started at target in 2024, and we have already converted 2,000 -- 3,000 trucks by 2015. We would be doing additional this year. But finally, our target is 2017, we would be -- 2027, sorry. I apologize, we would be not be consuming -- we will not be running any AGO-driven truck in the cement dispatches. Besides sustainability, wherein the CO2 generation from gas and gas is supposed to be a cleaner fuel. It cuts down the CO2, it brings us a cost saving of 60%. In any transportation, the fuel cost is around 60%. And in 60%, if you shave off 60%, what you are left it is 36% or 24%. That is the saving. All this was being -- I'm coming to the net attribute, which still we will not discuss is our cost efficiency. I think we qualify without beside scale, which I talked about spread in the country with logistics, et cetera. I think we tend to qualify as one of the least cost producer in the cement industry. We would be better placed than the lower centile of the packing order of the industry. And that has been our continuous exercise. CNG helps us to reach there. While we move on from this cost, then we'll see what more we do on the cost reduction, now I would like to bring in a question which is often posed to me or posed to anybody who stands here without on behalf of DCP, is what is the magic that DCP does, which helps us to achieve a consistent and excellent, and I would say, out of imagination figure for a cement industry, which is shown on the right-hand side. If you look at the last half year, we have got ROCE of 68%. We got a shareholder return of 129%, a yield of 5%. We have talked about what foundation we have. We have attractive market dynamics. We showed the location. We have immense extensive good quality reserves. Pan African manufacturing footprint, we have talked about that. Unmatched scale and a strong balance sheet. One such example is our leverage ratio and the interest ratio are very, very low. Now if you look at the some of these foundations, not all, but some of them would exist in other competitors. So why are they not churning out the numbers that we churn out financial numbers every year? The reason for that is the contribution to this is DCP multiplier, which is in the center. What is talks about fully vertical integrated. We talked about quarry to Lori. Capillary, logistics and exports. I think I mentioned in a very integrated channel, right going up to the customer's doorstep. Export, we have grown in a big way. High group by synergies. We have not talked about this. Let me talk on this subject. We are a part of a very big group, Dangote Group. The name Dangote itself is a big brand. And in whichever market, we don't have to sort of introduce ourselves the time we put a Dangote name on the bag. And that not only translates the expectations to which the DCP has to live up to, but it also brings us the brand equity vis-a-vis our competitors. Another synergies could be like we have access to getting the SGP bags. And currently, with refinery coming in, we have access to AGO, which we don't require much, but we require in the mining machineries. So though we may not benefit from the price of AGO, but we do get benefit on the assured availability and thereby also keeping a very minimal inventory to be able to manage our business. Benefit of that could have been seen during this war Iran and U.S. work. Our supplies were assured and uninterrupted whereby our business flush, as usual, despite of the world facing a challenge in the supply chain. I'm talking about Nigeria. Top of the mine brand, not only is a brand of Dangote -- it also what we do to make it happen in terms of quality, in terms of seeing that is available, et cetera, et cetera. And lastly, I think I talked in the initial slide, is a successful ApEx improvement. So it's not the physical assets, which alone can give their results. What we are trying to explain here is what is behind it, which we do differently from others which makes us churn out not 1 year, 2 years, but consistently give and take a few percentage here and there, a very high profitability across the years. Let me now move on to the next part, which shows I mentioned about cash flow generation. We want a healthy leverage. If you look at the first two blocks, I think every CFO will agree that if we can have a net debt to equity, which is minus -- which was in H1 '26. Net debt to adjusted EBITDA again is minus, which has dropped from 0.3 -- 0.3 itself is good. But the stride that we are making in that direction. And lastly, interest coverage ratio. From 5 to 8, it gives a lot of headroom. If the push comes to show, we have the headroom to press these levers. We don't see that happening, but that is the headroom that we have. Look at our paybacks. For a brownfield, we have a payback of 2.5 years. For greenfield, we were for 4 years, and so on and so forth. But the most thing that I would like to notice is our cash generation is 89%. So we have a very healthy ratio. We have attractive returns, and that is with all that we had talked about on the big from the first slide to this can be summarized under these heads, wherein -- excuse me for repeating it again and again, we are best placed to meet the requirement of the Africa's generation buildup, no doubt. And when the Africa generation come up, based on the 6 buckets which we have dealt all these slides, I think we have an unmatched potential. We have unmatched opportunity to be at the front burner to make this of that opportunity. I think with this, I would like to invite my equity to go into more details why we feel the African generation build-out is not a myth, is going to be a reality in the days to come. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, GMD. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Adetorera Banjo, and I'm the Chief Strategy Officer for Dangote Cement Group. I support the group in terms of its growth and expansion strategy. And I've spent the last 20 years in similar roles, just helping organizations in terms of their growth and transformation. 12 of those years were spent in KPMG, where I also led the strategy and operational business across Africa. Before that, I've also worked in organizations like MasterCard and JT Bank also supporting corporate banking across the continent. In the next 20 minutes, I will be sharing the Africa generation build-out story. And also our views in terms of Africa been the next growth frontier. And while we are passionate about the role, the Dangote Cement will play in this generational build-out story. So when we look at, I would say, global markets generally, we like to use the cement intensity curve to just position countries where they are in terms of their infrastructure build cycle. Usually, cement demand would accelerate in emerging markets, where urbanization and infrastructure needs are actually built. And then it begins to peak on moderates in maturing markets when the infrastructure is actually built out before -- in the mature market. And at this point, infrastructure has already been completed, they are already at the face of maintenance within that space. Today, if you look at Africa, Africa is really in the first zone, very, very early in the call. In terms of cement consumption per capita, Africa is about 160th KG, and if you look at that compared to other consumption benchmarks, Africa is 31% below global average -- 31% of global average, 44% of Europe's consumption average and then also 53% of Southeast Asia average. Now what this means really, it's not a weakness for Africa. This is really reinforcing the fact that the consumption catch-up story is real and there is a lot that cement has to play within that catch-up story. When we look at it in the global context, global cement demand itself has also declined over the years. China used to peak at about 1,400 KG per capita, and a significantly declined due to its negative cement growth, about minus 14%. If you also look at mature markets like the U.K., Germany, Canada, the centuries pass their infrastructure build-out. So if we strip out China, we strip out the matured market, Africa stands out as one of the last growth pointers in the world. And this is also further batches by further Africa contributed about 18% to global cement demand over the last 10 years, expected to grow at about 3% CAGR over the next 20 years, and sub-Sahara Africa production is even actually higher, about 5% CAGR growth as well. So the real question is what's the size of this market and this opportunity that we are faced with today. Now if you look at the entire ecosystem of the industry, cement manufacturing itself is about a $10 billion to $20 billion industry. But we know that cement manufacturing of cement itself is beyond just bag cements. It goes into adjust such as the cement derivatives, other building materials, bringing together the Africa building materials industry. And that industry itself has an addressable market size of about $100 billion. Cement continues to be the center and the cornerstone of that ecosystem, contributes when we add that -- when we add cement manufacturing to concrete and premix, making up the cement, cements materials contributes about 35% to that growth. Now I know you've heard me talk about cement, cement, cement, not really a cement investment this is, this is more of an Africa infrastructure thesis and story. And the reason why is because Africa has to build the routes. Africa has to build infrastructure. Africa has to build power. And the reason why he has to build this is because it's way behind where a lot of all these global economies are. And this is a market that we're not just hopeful to build. This is a market that has to be built. And then also, it has to be built because we need to close that development gap in Africa. And in terms of the development gap, there a lot of what we'll call drivers that are driving development and growth in Africa, which will speak to shortly. So when we look at the Africa demographics, GMD had mentioned that by 2050, Africa will be contributing 20% to the population growth. And today, Africa consumes about just 6% of global cement demand, and that's Dangote's is where the opportunity really sits. So what's really driving this opportunity? One, again, it's a population growth. By 2050, Africa is supposed to be growing from 15 billion people to about [ 2.5 ] billion people. And 60% of that population will be under the age of 25. And what does that mean? It would drive things like schools, it will drive demand for health care, drive demand for basic infrastructure. Now beyond that, urbanization is also expected to double to about 1.4 billion by 2050. And what that means that every urban resident would require a house, will require roads, would also require schools. And all of this is centered around cement because cement is a major material that helps in this build out. Now this is not just a population or organization story. It goes beyond that into things like transport corridor build-out, we will require roads who also require stations, would require bridges, drainages. It also goes into regional integration, so that trade come facilitated across regions and corridors are built. And every one of those demands, so to say, is also very cement-intensive. Now despite the rapid population, the urbanization and all of that, Africa, like I mentioned, is still way below global average. And the interesting thing is that East Africa was actually a disposition about -- sorry, South Eastern Asia was actually a disposition about 50 years ago and that have grown in the last 3 decades. And this is where really the Africa infrastructure build-out story sits, and then the Africa infrastructure consumption also sits. Now before we go into the infrastructure gap, I just want to take a moment to help everyone visualize the scale of this continent hold Africa. Africa in terms of land mass is bigger than the United States than China, then Japan and most of Western Europe when we combine it together. That is the scale of Africa. And that is the scale that we're talking about when we talk about infrastructure graph, creating a multi-decade opportunity, especially for construction. Now the investment required to build this skill is also very limited. So for example, if I just take roads, if you look at our roads today, 90% of the trade that happens across Africa is by road and about 40% of the population in the rural area don't even have good access to routes. Also, when you look at power, over half of sub-Sahara Africa is without electricity, and the list goes on. So if I combine or take a view around the roads, ports, power, infrastructure, industrial zone, the entire investment gap that runs across Africa is about 170 billion. And this is where the opportunity really sits when we talk about the build-out story. Now in terms of private investment, we started to see some underway, especially in the logistics sector, where we have deep World committing about $3 billion to build port infrastructure in Africa. We have some major expansion projects also underway. And all of this would help to build that infrastructure story and build infrastructure build-outs that requires. But the real question is why those infrastructure demand matter for cements, right? And one of the things is the fact that infrastructure demand itself is structural. We need to build regional integrations to also accelerate the investments that we require in Africa, tally for Africa trade. And these projects are highly cement intensive. And what that means is that local producers like Dangote Cement that has the scale, you saw the skill of our platform in Nigeria, for example, has that skill, that has that reliable supply, that has the distribution channels are well positioned to take advantage of this opportunity and to also help to build the volume growth that we see in Africa. So the question really is how does this demand clear across different markets? Of course, again, like I mentioned, Africa is huge. And Africa cement growth is broad-based, meaning that not every market will grow at the same pace and in the same way. So there are three distinct growth engines that would ship Africa cement demand outlook over time, and these are across 3 markets. The first is the skill market. And this skill markets are largely supported by population growth and urbanization. So if you look at Nigeria and Ethiopia, for example, very high population the share amount and the share size of the population already helps to sort of grow the demand or the demand for infrastructure for cements within the market. Then we also have corridor led markets, and this is where we have countries like Senegal, Ivory Coast, as Tanzania Cameron. In this market, demand was supported by trade corridors. So interregional trade happens, majority of demand comes because of the position of these countries along the trade corridors. And we continue to see infrastructure build-outs to facilitate those streets. We continue to see cement demand in terms of construction. And a typical example is the -- is very instrumental in terms of regional trade in Africa. And then finally, we have the frontier markets. Now this frontier markets, demand are shipped by country-specific dynamics in countries like Ghana, DRC, Zambia are part of the contributing within this frontier market. They either grow or do not grow based on market-specific policies. So for example, if importation is bound in this control is not find in this country has a direct effect on cement demand within the country. Now in terms of our portfolio in Dangote, our portfolio cuts across these three growth engines, and we're able to capture demand and opportunities in the market as they are right. So whether it's opportunities that stem from population growth or just regional trade or just market dynamics or state of development within the market. Now this market or these growth engines don't sit in isolation. And what happens is that a lot of them are connected, physically through trade corridors. And this is really where and how the demand physically moves from one country to another. And we use the concept of regional corridors, Regional corridors really help to ensure that there's a linkage between the production hub and underserved markets within Africa. So first is the West Africa corridor is one of the biggest corridors within the Dangote platform today. And that's because it's the largest West Africa corridor today. It connects 5 countries, Nigeria, Sugan, to Codey by road. And infrastructure requirements for this regional market is by road. Similar to it is also the corridor between Senegal and Mali. Now Mali is very landlocked, and it means it has to rely on the port infrastructure in Senegal to feed its cement demand. Similarly, in East Africa, we also have the gate report between Daesan linking that to Uganda -- for the northern corridor as well in terms of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi. So these are corridors that are linked by the port trade and demand flow through these corridors. Then lastly, we have Central and Southern corridor as well. And this is where the critical mineral corridor sits. And we have major copper and cobalt moving across this corridor from Zambia to DRC to Angola. And this is underpinned by the Lobitocorridor that I mentioned earlier. Now this Lobito corridor is really transformational for Africa, because it's going to connect Africa, not just within Africa, but to the rest of the world in terms of accelerating development and exports. It's a corridor that is currently U.S. and the U.K. back today there significant financial commitment of about $6 billion to build this 30-kilometer a connection and authority undergoing operations as we speak. Now what do these corridor matters because they are major and big drivers for demand. They both drive demand directly in terms of just building the infrastructure that supports the corridor and then also indirectly through other impact of the corridor. So whether it's housing, whether it's the mineral belts, whether it's the trade or the special economic zone that's going to be happening across the region. And because of this product of this skill, just think of cross-border rail connection, cross-border ports, require significant investments, significant volumes of cement as well and players, very, very few players can actually sort of support this sort of growth. And -- to support the growth and demand, you require large scale. And this is the platform or the capabilities that Dangote Cement has built across the 11 markets that we operate in over the last 2 decades. And then finally, I mean, we've gone through how the demand grows within each of the different markets. We've gone through how it physically moves across the continent. The next thing is how do we then capture the economic realities of this growth. And this is where the concept of the project contested at the -- post coastal markets come into play. What happens is that the most attractive markets, those markets that obviously have the structural demand. So the demand has to be defers. Market conditions also have to be strong. And if you look at the projected domestic markets, these are markets where you have very, very strong margins because the producers here are all integrated availability of limestone, the builds logistics across the markets to support the flow. And then also, they are enjoying some level of protection, protection in terms of importation into that -- into the market. So what this means is that -- from a present environment, they enjoy the most price in structure in that environment. And then also, they become -- they are the most attractive markets. So we have countries in Nigeria and Ethiopia in the zone. Then we have the context that corridors, also very similar to the protected domestic markets because the players here also have integrated capacity because of limestone query availability. However, the market is open to imports and pricing becomes a context because pricing is more contested. And what is happening in this market, again, is that -- the people that win or succeed or the players that we succeed are the ones that have the skill and logistics to sort of win in that market. And then finally, we have the ex post coastal market. Now this ex post coastal market, just as a name depicts, they are the markets with no form of protection. But beyond that, majority of these players are grinding capacity because limestone availability is probably in the very limited. So you have things like bargain plants and wiring plants there. And because of that, the fact that there are no structured protection within the market is very open to import. That's where you see a lot of imposition going on in that market. But beyond that, there's a lot of FX volatility within the market. There's a lot of import parity in terms of pricing. And what is very critical is the fact that to play in this market, operational efficiency becomes a core capability for players within this market. And this is a market where cost discipline matters is the market where efficiency matters. So when it comes to attractiveness of market, the Dangote portfolio today is sort of built in such a way that our cement market runs across a lot of these markets, and we're able to sort of build our competencies within the structurally advantaged market. And then even in the case where we don't, our scale, our execution capacity, our cost leadership position allows us to win within this market. So right now, I would just like to focus a bit more on Nigeria because Nigeria is one of those markets where every of these dynamics that I've mentioned have sort of played out, and we have successfully taken advantage of the opportunities within the market and proven it. But before I go into in-depth into that, the Nigeria market today, as we may all know, has been through the most significant macro reset. And we're at a point where it's delivering greater measurable stability across various macroeconomic indices. So whether it's in terms of recovering in terms of growth Inflation is easy enough in the market today and the policies are working. So for example, if you look at our GDP growth today in Nigeria over the last 4, 5 years, we've seen a lot of stability, which is tremendous. Post COVID, GDP is tracking at about 4%, way higher than global averages. Also, in terms of external reserves and Nigeria's FX reserves, that has also been rebuilt, and that has also taken a very good trajectory, mainly after the unification of the market going to about $58 billion as we speak. And what this means is that it gives producers and it gives investors that confidence to come back into the market again to put capital because of the economic activities that is going on. Also when it comes to inflation, again, inflation is another indices that has also delivered in terms of macroeconomic reforms. And that's because tightening monetary policies have started to provide impact. And then we've seen inflation come down to about 17%, closing the year at about 16%, which is also tracking very good in terms of easing inflation. And then finally, the exchange rate. If you look at our exchange rate today as well, since the devaluation exchange rate is now steady and also tracking below even the 2026 forecast at about 1,300. And that's the fourth pillar we are looking at. Now quickly run to the infrastructure spend again because this infrastructure story is quite interesting for us. And what we can see, if you look at the last chart on the right, infrastructure -- public infrastructure investment is that public infrastructure spend has reason over the last 4 years, higher than global average. Moving from about 3% to 5.5% as well. So if I bring all this together, what it shows is that the indicators are tracking well. These are numbers that are projections. These are numbers that have been delivered and it's no longer a story about volatility, but a story about what's the stability that we're experiencing now in -- is going to unlock. What is it going to unlock in terms of delayed infrastructure, in terms of housing investment and also in terms of cement demand because everything is built around cement. Now going to cement demand, and we can also see how this macro stability is playing in cement demand. The industry today consumes about 32 million metric tons, and it's expected to grow at about 5% over the next 10 years. If when we look at a downside scenario because this is a base case scenario, and that's the chart on top, the growth is also extremely meaningful, growing to about 48 million metric tons in the base case scenario and 37 million metric tons in a down case scenario. What is also driving this is, again, the Paata consumption? Recall that Africa was sitting at about 168 kg per capita. Nigeria is about 138 kg per capita, which is even lower than the Africa average, but slightly higher than Sub-Sahara average. But again, a lot of the structural drivers that we had mentioned before, especially around infrastructure build, housing, roads, urbanization, the corridors and the commercial industrial recovery will continue to reinforce the future demand outlook for cement. And I think for us in Dangote, the real question is who is now positioned to supply this in the market? And that takes us to the supply footprint in Nigeria. Now if you look at the supply footprint in Nigeria, first thing is that the industry production assets are all located very, very close to limestone reserves, very, very close to the demand center. What this reinforces is the fact that it is an industry, but cost competitiveness is very high. But beyond that, what this also means is that majority of lime deposits have been -- limestone deposits have been taken, and barriers to entry is quite very high. Also, if you look at it as well in terms of capacity, we all know that it may take significant capital investment to put up a plant. We saw our cement plants, over 5 lines in one location. But beyond that, the capacity today in Nigeria is about 69 million metric tons. And there is planned capacity to expand that, and this is the industry really. We've seen an additional 38 million metric tons being planned. And for us, this really shows that the industry is really, really ready to take advantage of the growth in the market, not just the growth, but also the consumption catch-up that we mentioned from the consumption per capita. And this is both domestically and then also through exports to underserved markets. And then because this capacity has been built, what it means is that once utilization kicks in, it goes directly to margins for the industry players. Now when we look at the industry players, leadership, market leadership cuts across three of the largest producers. And today, Dangote is the clear market leader. We actually have clear market leader in terms of production and also in terms of capacity. Production wise, we have 53% market share. And likewise, in terms of our capacity, above 51% market share. Now Nigeria is -- of course, Nigeria -- Nigeria story really provides a skill in which a Africa, story also sits on. In terms of capacity, again, recall that Nigeria, we said Nigeria has about [ 12% ] share of market capacity. We have a 35.2 million metric tons in Nigeria. But when we add a sub-Sahara Africa capacity to our Pan-Africa capacity brings a total capacity to 55 million metric tons. And when we compare ourselves to the next comparable competitor, we are about 2x bigger than that in terms of capacity. And what this means is that we are -- today, we are sub-Sahara's Africa leading cement company with full self-sufficiency in clinker needs and we are well positioned to take advantage of this Africa build-out story. In addition to that, we have very, very ambitious expansion plan that's going to take us to 80 million metric tons. And this will position us as the top 5 leading cement player across the world. Now what also showed us this morning, really. I mean, we've gone through the markets, we've seen how Dangote is positioned within the market. And I'll quickly like to run us through the playbook that we have continued to deploy whether in Nigeria on Pan-African location. So not just win in the market but to take advantage of the opportunities in the market. So if you look at this, our approach to the African market was not just one decision or one single move, it was a sequence of five different decisions that we had to make over time, and this has compounded into the market position that we have today. So firstly was the fact that earlier on -- earlier in our journey about two decades ago, that significant investment in integration and just aligning to the backward integration policy, ensure that we put commitments first before any capital, and we make sure that we build that over time. Secondly was our ability to quickly lock in the natural resources, lock in limestone in this question, we have a -- for example, Bojana has 8 billion tons of limestone today over 80 years, and has also become very clinical, self-sufficient. That has been very, very instrumental in terms of our growth story. Thirdly is the fact that we have been able to build capacity ahead of demand with a capacity of about 35 million metric tons in Nigeria versus a demand of 25 million metric tons. What this also brings stable is the fact that we've built ahead anticipating the growth that will come off in future. And then the fact that we own our own distribution fleets today also enables that we are able to control demand up on to the last mile. We have over 9,000 trucks in Nigeria today. Pan-Africa, we have over 10,000 trucks, and that continues to help us deliver in terms of distribution capabilities. And then finally, our ability to compound all this growth levers into a leadership position across Africa. And this has helped us to deliver in terms of our financial outcomes. When you look at our financial outcomes, best-in-class in terms of our results, beyond our market position, which is #1 in terms of capacity share, market share and revenue, we've been able to deliver about $2 billion in the Nigerian -- in terms of our Nigeria revenues, enabling us to deliver [ 60% ] in terms of EBITDA margin. And this growth and playbook is what we've also been disciplined enough to replicate across our 11 markets today. So right now, you've seen the infrastructure gap within the market. You've seen the Africa growth and generational build-out story. We've also seen the fact that macro reset has also helped in terms of building this confidence in the market. And what this gives us is the fact that we are very much confident in the platform that we've built to take advantage of the opportunities within the market to take advantage of also the infrastructure gap and opportunities in the market and to build volume over time. At this point, I'm going to hand back to GMD who is now going to tell us about our business model and how we built it in a very purposeful way, not just to take advantage, but to also ensure that it's irreplicable by anyone. Thank you very much.

I'm back. You can see once more, don't worry. Have patience. We have been talking about irreplicable, we have been talking about various things that we got to we got a brand, we do something differently, or maybe a more deep drive insight is required to be able to buy that -- I'm sure I can see look at the audiences and I was presenting that. If you require more -- some more evidence to that. What in this session we are trying to go, we had to do exactly the same. When we say we irreplicable, we'll try to say why we say so. Now with this to start with, what is important to understand, how we do it. Kindly recall the Dangote multipliers, likely let's go into deep dig in some of those. I will not read each one of them because some of them we have been overlapping with what I have already stated in the past. For example, let's say, what I would try to point about is planned procurement and construction. We are beginning from the time when we start thinking of a project. There's something time elapses between conceptualization to fast groundbreaking. And so there are two elements in that. One is, what is the time? What time is money. And b is, what is the cost? Our -- we have a very financial strength, and we have not deviated very significantly from our service providers or we call them our business partners. What we get? We get a very good bargain from them, consistently plant after plant. Our financial strength ensures that we meet the requirements we are very prompt in making the payments, whereby ensure that we get a high discount because we take care of the cash flows. This is very important. And also since we are repeating most of the equipment, most of the capacities, the drawings are same, only you have to see the material handling from one section to another section. So even for a supplier, this engineering work, which is practically not adding any value is a very shortened one. It helps us in reducing the whole time of the project. It helps apply to see that his investments are less because the engineering effort comes down. And also, we get a very good bargain. That is the first step that we move in the direction of seeing our CapEx has come down and reasonable compared to my competitive DCP's competitors in the market. The next one is quarries and mining. We have been spending some time this morning and Adetorera also mentioned or the scale at which we operate. And to be able to produce at their scale, you require reserves, which we talked about, not only quantity and quality. But one thing I will be -- to convey my point, I'll just try to make it when the plant size increases, the scale goes up. We have almost around 55 million tonnes, maybe around 18 to 19 lines we operate across all our operations. Each line that we operate, which is of 6,000 tonnes, which means around practically 7,500 or 7,800 tonnes of cement, what it means is with a blink of an eye or every second, three cement bags passes. And for us to be able to ensure the quality, we talked about brand equity, we recall. Okay, a group brand equity advantage makes us first buy easy. But a repeat buy is not on the name. Repeat and buy is on the product, whether it fulfills the promise. And to deliver the promise, what we do is we don't control quality. It will look to be very absurd. We try to build in the quality because the scale is such each line, three bags every second, humanly impossible to control. We have invested heavily into our quality control, starting with the cross-belt analyzer, realization and ending up with a ruble air. What it means is we are not dependent upon the human skills, human efficiencies and whereby seeing product besides the quality and the brand equity, what it also helps is in helps in the various cost reduction because you can have a better product, better mix of additives, et cetera, et cetera. So this is the second piece, which contributes to our thing. Next one is centralization. When we do centralization, what it helps us is, again, it cuts down a very significant part of our project execution because it is similar equipment we've got drawing is there, foundation still are there. We just start work. Beyond that, when we get the machinery, when we operate, your people, you already have trained people who have been working on the similar machine elsewhere in your organization. Your inventory levels can be very significantly -- inventory is money and there to unutilized money. So that brings us a further element because the cement industry, there's no one silver blade. It is every small step that we take in the direction of production of cement, selling of cement has to be done efficiently, has to be done better than competitors, then only we can maintain the leadership and produce the results that what we are producing. Going to the next, sales distribution. We talked about logistics, we've talked about RAS that we have. The next slide, I'll hold this back for one slide. We'll give it in more in detail of that. Lastly is the premium product. For our excellent quality control investment, which is humanly independent because our skill cannot be controlled by human being. It has to be automated. We are able to produce premium product across all our operations. In the 11 countries that we operate, we are in competition with who is who in the cement industry. I would not like to take the name, but some of you are watching we know who are the competitors in Tanzania, who are the competitors in South Africa, who are the competitor in Nigeria. So who's in who in the maybe except for the Indian producers. All other international producers are there. And we have been able to demonstrate in command premium ahead of them. What it shows? It show that our product is view has got to recall and which breaks the myth that Africa cannot produce a premium product. I will -- permit me, I'll take a few seconds to explain what I have always given as an example. When we were young, when our fathers were there, they always said, Japanese product was supposed to be cheap. Some of you may have find it difficult to digest. It was supposed to be a cheap product, and we gradually graduated to being a premium high-tech product. Same thing with China in our generation. China was senior as a cheap product. Now today, it is giving U.S. a run for the money. European for the money. The next believe is Africa, and we have demonstrated that. In competition with all the MNCs, we produce a product which is better than them. We have a very exorbitant system by which we ensure that. And the latest example is, we have a international companies only work in the oil well exploration, and they use oil well, which is all imported in Africa. We have our last -- large reserves of oil, but still we don't manufacture oil well timing. When we started producing in the first sample that we supplied to all our potential customers, we got a very positive feedback. This again shows that Africa and B in DCP has the capability to produce premium product. And that is why if you combine all this together, whether it is quality that we don't control, again, I refer. We try to build in the quality. So this philosophical difference makes us a very cost-effective proposition. Another unique thing is since we are a different type of organization than most of the -- our major competitors, we do not have a standard template which is cut and pasted everywhere. We do a specific location, specific market, a tailor-made solution. The tailor-made means there could be locations where we have huge market. And we have a raw material in abundance and of good quality. The solution that we adopt is something which is integrated. That means we're going for relatively higher investment compared to other solutions. But then we produce the -- and the host of countries which flags us on are the ones where we have integrated unit. If we move to a location, we doesn't have the privilege of having, but they are not blessed to have high-grade or high-quality limestone, we're going from a grinding unit, which is relatively low cost. We also do two more things. Some places wherein we feel market is relatively attractive and would require cement in tying relatively a large quantity, we have gone from a bulk terminal. But gradually, we have seen wherever we have gone with a bulk terminal, we have graduated to grinding unit. And that is what we did in Ghana, that's what we are doing in -- which will be converted to that. Lastly, if at all be fine, the underlying principle everywhere is one -- that we should be the most competitive supplier of cement in the market. If we had to become the largest market share, if you have to compete ahead of others, compete ahead of all those big names when we need to be the least cost producer or supply in the market. And that is we are talking of cost to service, not just to produce to ultimately what customer pays is what he receives. To enable that, the export is another means which we adopt. We have advantage of being a proximity to the most of the countries in the sub-Sahara and Africa. So here, we have put down what with this philosophy, what are the assets that we have, where we're located, what thing we follow. And that, again, makes it very capital-intensive friendly, I would say, judiciously invested, whether they just overspending or spending, which is just specially even extended template, it comes from somewhere, and we have to adopt that. Next I think I will not spend much time. We have talked about this in the past that we have selectively sort of over a period of time, picked up the countries which have got large reserves, good quality, invested in that. Collectively, we have got access to 4.2 billion, which is around 80 years of life time. One unique thing that I would like to make out is differently from others. If we look for solutions wherein the limestone alone is -- limestone is the major raw material For limestone not the only raw material. Sometimes for chemical balance, you require some additives. There again, we have been able to engineer. We don't go in for a process, which is again a standard. We have a very close dialogue with R&D, our own quality people, and we try to work out a process solution which can work and most of the additives are either present or can be made available economically rather than importing or buying from outside, which some of our competitors do. And which again gives us without scale and other -- which can be seen that what we generate and what we consume raw material is more or less the same. The difference is primarily on account of inventory beginning of the year and end of the year. Besides logistics, another area where our major cost element goes in cement production is fuel. What is the consumption of fuel? We have a very modern plant, state-of-art, we have been upgrading tech-enabled plant, automated plant, which ensures efficiency or specific power consumption is one of the lowest in the industry. It is also the cost of the energy becomes important. Because two multiplying determines the cost of the energy and cement production. What we do is before we put up a plant, we try to look for what are the locally available fuels. And not only we try to build a plant suitable for that, we also look for can there be some other fuel which I can bring to the site. The examples which we normally give is that of Obajana. We did not have gas at Obajana. We brought the gas to Obajana, by laying a 60 kilometers of pipeline. That is the philosophy of work and all our clients are equipped for all varieties of fuel. You name one, I'll tell you, yes, we can fire. Whether it's crude, whether it's --, whether it's coal, whether it is lignite, whether it is -- some investment we do in this area. With our experience in our emerging markets, emerging markets is one of the ways that we're going to be successful is how you can manage the crisis and the risk. And we get it every day, not one day. But we are -- we feel this is one route by which we can, I think I gave an example of the recent crisis of gas pipeline failure in the context of AGO, but this is also applicable here because we have a multifuel capability. It permits us to switchover economically or even in the adverse situation to something which will not make you stop your business. This is one cost that we built in template in all the plants. On the right-hand side is the alternative fuel. Every plant of DCP has a potential to use AFS plan of a high percentage. But the question to be asked looking from this data is, why is that some of them have a higher percentage while others have a low percentage? And low percent is slightly on a lower side, I would say. The reason is very simple. If you draw a line, the ones with a higher percent of the countries were in imported fuel is used. The relative advantage of using alterative fuel is greater there. And the more important than that is, and this is the any unlike which -- some other parts of the developed country, it doesn't happen. Developed country is the use of certain thing is supported by regulatory controls, not only for the consumption, also the producer to somebody who is generating a waste, he would be very eager to dispose of your -- dispose of his space. Whereas in the emerging markets, it's not only true in our operations in India also, it happens in a big the same way from where I come. Once you show a way to the local, let's say, biowaste especially, how do you use it the prices go up. It becomes more costlier than the fuel. Okay. So -- we have to have a different template, different working for that, and we try to balance it out. That's why you see this. Our intention is to be at 20% level across the group. We are rejigging some of our strategy for the ones which are lower in like something. I don't know how far we'll be successful is to bring RDF from outside -- but the other way to look at RDF importing it, why should we be bringing the waste of other country to our parent company. There could be other -- see, the best in innovator in the world or one of the best. Let me I'm not authority to say the best, I would qualify it as one of the best skill. With 1,400 degrees centigrade to 1,500 degrees centigrade, you can burn most of the things that you find in the world. And it is an excellent opportunity that we have as and when the regularity support comes in the various areas of our operation, the capacity that we are building, the investment that we have done it will come very handy. And many of the -- as we've seen the examples of the developing countries, many of the places, the cost -- energy cost is negative. What does negative means? Maybe Mr. Thomas and my friend can confirm that. They pay you for using the fuel. In fact, they've deliver it at your factory, and they give you price to dispose it or because they have to pay a bigger penalty if the waste is there. On the contrary, for waste, which is routing in the fields in everything entry the market. So this is why we said there's one investment that we have done, and I'm sure going for -- which will make us again a very cost-effective producer whether addresses the core of the Maxim cost that is. And that is why we are one of the lowest cost producer of cement. I think we talked about this. I think I said in one of my slides, Yes, I'll come back to us when we talk about the sales and distribution, wherein we talked about philosophy of RSA, et cetera. I think some part of logistics, I gave a flavor of that. More would follow. What here we like to talk about is what is the distribution model that we adopt, and which again fits into our RAS. We produce a product, of which we are very proud of with the premium product, which come on best in the class. Now how do we reach out to the people. The loyalty part will deal separately. We are at our distributors. And the distributors carry it to the market, beyond every state is a country is quite widespread. Most of the countries where we are present because they are all big-sized land mass countries. To make it efficient, we have got warehouses or what we call as depots. An example, in Nigeria, we have 46 depots. None competes with us in that number or anywhere near that. We have 8,000 our own trucks. We have some CTS trucks, we get around 10,000 plus, no one is anywhere near there. From the depot, when we take a last mile, we have got customer empowerment there, they take it there. We've got 65,000 retailers, 65,000 retailers. This takes us to every nook and corner of the street of the countries, I'm talking on Nigeria numbers, where if you go on a street, you can't miss the Bangladesh. Added to us, understanding the constraints that our retailers have, we have introduced a new concept of providing them with containers. As I said, we are following variable applicable FMCG model. All your Pepsis, Coca-Colas, they provide deep frizzer at some -- this is -- we have provided the equivalent of that in terms of containers. And the magnitude that we provided in the market and we aspire to do this 8,500. We only go for what it does is it makes the product available. Just remember RAS availability. It ensures that every time I have a material there. And what is visible will be sold. That is another concept that we follow. Now beyond that, we talked about the road conditions we have. This is what the major road, walk into the lines, especially during rains, they are unapproachable. And this truck of 45 tonner, for sure, cannot go there. Truck of 35 tonner cannot go there. So what we have scheme is for our retailers to assess this last leg of institution, we have started a new scheme of giving a tricycle. And that takes them to the interiors of every construction side. So altogether, there cannot be a place where if there is a demand for the Dangote Cement which is everywhere, and we cannot reach out efficiently, timely in educated manner. That is the strength of our -- and that's why we combined the premium or the cost to service low as compared to our competitors. Just to carry forward the story of last-mile distribution, customer distribution. We have learned from some of our international experience. As I was giving example some other day. In Australia, one of the multinational company had to leave that company -- leave that country, sorry. Because the whole distribution went into the hands of the few. And they started then dictating the price on the cement producers. Now, we learned from those mistakes. That's why I say we are very quick at learning, and we are not assumed of that. We adopted in our model, we not let the concentration of power of a customer being a few heads. It takes a toll on managing the customer is worth the investment. And if you look at the graph in the between besides the other thing I was telling via what awards we win, I'll just put a few samples there, but there are many, many more. Our top 10 customers only account for 18%, 1-8. On an average, if I divide 18 by 10, it comes to 1.8. But the biggest customer only hold off 3%. That means they are not in a position to dictate terms to us. On the contrary, they would do what we want them to do. What service we want to provide to the res what they do. One thing that I missed out in the earlier slide is, we also have a unique our sales distribution leg, which is we call a pre-sellers. The pre-sellers are the ones who are the food soldiers. They have an app-enabled journey map. They are supposed to be going from each counter to counter. And they give a feedback of the requisite information, what is the price, what is the customer selling, what is the stock. And this all together makes us very -- enables us to quickly react to the market situations. And this has been very successful in being is being adopted by the -- some of our competitors also. We talked about tech enabled. In that technology, with the changing times, as I said, we are very good at copying. So we quickly adopted ourselves to the AI technology. But we have been very selective in using it where it makes a business case and a sense to us. And the area where we felt it can bring value and where we have implemented is in the killing mill and process optimization, predictive maintenance. Quality and quarry optimation, I think we have talked about it. Most of the places we have done it and we'll go into detail. Only thing with the work in progress is today is a demand forecasting. All this put together, they are in some way or other, as to the improvement of efficiency, improvement of productivity, ultimately keep in mind, it reduces our cost of operations. We are not being any fancy adoption of technology in DCP. And that is why we are one of the least cost producers. Given just a case study, one of the latest baby that we have introduced in the technology field is the ePort. This is a final confirmation of delivery electronically. This is again something like what Korea service does it. of them. So earlier, our methology was we bill will go. It will be received acknowledge, comes back, then the whole cycle of completed. But until that, again, we were dependent upon the driver efficiency. Coupled with that, we have a distribution may system, wherein seamlessly, a customer can see how the payment has been made, where it a figure, what is outstanding, when it is left, where is the EPA so that he can plan for the Down the line is retailers lineup, et cetera. And final thing is when the delivery received, there's a photographic evidence of driver in the customer of the delivery received and confirmed in quantity, quality, et cetera. It eliminates and now of their benefits all read out the most important is this practically eliminates the reconciliation. And it also gives us the trust and the faith that we have a transparent system, which has no scope to be disputed. It also helps the customer to plan its cash flow. It has a company to -- we also recognize the sales time all the benefits that we can think of or putted here. We have just initiated this. We have made some great strides in this. And the feedback that we have from our customers that they are very, very happy and is rolling it out very at a fast speed. I think I'll -- this part or the next part of this presentation of this section, I'll request my colleague, Mr. , who can do a better justice to this than what I can do on the logistic part of it. Mr. please.

Good afternoon. My name is I'm the Head of Logistics for Dangote Cement since 2024, and my career was pretty much built over 23 years in the parcel and freight businesses. I served companies like TNT and then FedEx as Director of Network, Director of Planning and Engineering; and lately as Managing Director for operations. Now, the purpose of the next slides over about 10 minutes will be to demonstrate to you that logistics is a strategic assets for Dangote Siemens, not simply a support function. And the reason behind that is that logistics is deeply linked to at least 4 of the competitive advantages of Dangote. Our distribution reach, scale, costs, obviously, and we are the ones who carry our strong brands everywhere. Now it takes a lot of years to build what I'm going to show you, and we were able to build capabilities in land, rail and seaborne that combined, they provide business a very efficient manner of reaching the markets. Actually, this multichannel and modern setup for the supply chain has supported the business to grow a CAGR of 26% from 2020 until 2025. And we will continue to be the backbone of the future growth of the company. This is the detailed map of one of the largest cement distribution network in the continent. Let me start by lines. We are heavily supported by assets, so 10,000-plus owned vehicles. Additionally, 51 depots. Not to mention 65,000 retail location ensure that we reach everywhere in the domestic market as well as the ground exportation. One of the corridors mentioned by my colleague, for instance, [indiscernible] and Ghana, with daily gross debts with silo tankers with tippers to carry the clinker and with flat beds. Now we also leverage from existing infrastructure on rail. We use it in countries like South Africa, Tanzania, Congo and we even do exportation from Senegal to Mali. But the numbers that I'd like you to memorize from this presentation from this slide actually are 2, 3, 1. They talk about the seaborne capabilities that were built, two export powerful terminals, three dedicated receiving terminals and one another one coming, by the way, and one dedicated jetty. Now this infrastructure was able to deliver 34 clinker shipments only over 2025. For exportation, Nigeria plays a role as the anchor of the system. Our two ports over there they connect our scale, and they convert it into export growth. Port apart and Apapa combined, they have a capacity of 4 metric -- 4 million tons per annum. Today, we use them for both imports and process gypsum as well as export clinker. We are prepared to offload a vessel of 30,000 tons in about 3 days. Not only that, we are also investing to make sure that these ports are prepared for the future growth. So our target is to reach 10 million tons per annum. And the two highlights I would like to give are the expansion of that is ongoing and the deep supports close to the free trade zone in Ag state. If you think about this infrastructure, it is truly transforming Nigeria into a regional hub because we delivered through it a robust growth in the recent years. Year-over-year, our export grew close to 20%, 24% to 25%. But if you compare to the previous 3 years, we were able to multiply by 3, the number of clinker shipments that we actually performed. And this is supported by a high capability, high ability actually to hire those vessels in an efficient manner. Now, if we look at the other side of the equation, the receiving terminals. They are very important because actually, they extend the reach of these integrated countries production. Ghana, Sierra Leone and Senegal they are dedicated for us. They have about 40,000 metric tons of storage capacity, minimum 200 meters. And that has been -- they have been commissioned since 2022, 2017, Senegal is ongoing. But the jetty that we have fully dedicated to Dangote Cement in Cameron, it connects to an 8-meter lag directly the clinker that is being offloaded to our plants, which obviously provides a lot of cost efficiencies in the process. So I covered in a nutshell, land, rail and seaborne. But when we speak about network in Africa, many people view the infrastructure challenges as obstacles for growth into the companies. I'm going to mention some of them. The road infrastructure, if you think about that, only 13% of the roads in Sub-Saharan Africa are actually 80% of them are in very, very bad shape. And there is no maintenance service across the roads. In spite of those challenges, DCP has managed transformed them into really competitive differentiation. This is how we do it. First, on the rod parts, we use our density. Our plants are strategically located. Just to mention one, is pretty close to the biggest city in Africa like Lagos. We also have the depots. And as GMD anticipated, we use these retailers, we use our own containers, branded containers to serve them as this is more visible and attractive to the markets. Our workshops, they are able to do pretty much everything a transportation company needs. We may open and refurnish an engine, for instance. We have our own retreating facility to recycle the tyres. But lastly, one very important item on our cost base is fuel. And if you foresee the fuel availability, depending on importation, they're going to add a lot of volatility to your costs. It's hard to plan ahead, right? The way we address that is by building our own CNG infrastructure. And the right word is actually building because our plants receive to the pipes, natural gas. We are the ones who actually compress the natural gas to make them eligible for our trucks. So we are building way a number of mother stations, daughter stations where we can actually fill our own trucks. Probably, you have seen this slide before. I would like to add some details to it, right? This slide speaks about the three distinct purposes, providing our export advantages. Number one, we use the spare capacity of our plants. So that, by nature, brings a very good cost advantage. However, it's not only that. By doing that, we ensure access to these high-quality reserves off-line that we have, for instance, in Nigeria to other markets. Number two, this is a region that is growing faster on getting more integrated. And we are very well positioned right inside this trade framework. So Dangote Cement is #1 producer in the region. This integration is actually forecasting, if you only consider after an They are forecasting 2026 at 10% growth. And we have a past track record of 32% in exportation growth only in Nigeria. So -- by that, we show that we are disciplined in execution and we can, yes, take this opportunity. Finally, it's very exciting to be part of the CNG NAV transformation. 8,000 trucks is a very heavy investment in fleets. And let me mention some of the advantage that we have with that. The number one is definitely a cleaner fuel. So if you compare the CO2 emitted by -- the kilo of CO2 emitted by kilometer from diesel 1.55, you drop to CNG, 0.96. Number two, the cost savings, 60% of something that represents about 60% of your cost base is relevant. And we will deliver over the next year's $90 million annual savings starting in 2026. Number three is the FX insulation. Imagine that you are on top in Nigeria of these immense reserves of CNG, right? We can be very competitive and be very safe on the FX, if you use those immense reserves. And finally, what I think is very -- it's a very good advantage, is that many of our competitors is simply not viable for them using diesel trucks to reach some of the routes. By using CNG, we increased our market penetration because we will be the ones serving those customers. Finally, and this is my last slide. Let me just give you a background before I go over it. Today, we cover pretty much 100% of our inbound needs, what we supply to our plants with our own fleets. We also cover 100% of our exportation with our own fleet. But when it comes to the domestic distribution, we have a share about 70% covered by us and 30% covered by our own customers. And that was mentioned a couple of times like GMD. We call it customer truck empowerment scheme, CTES. So this is a mutual benefit program that actually, in a nutshell, BCP provides the trucks to the customers so they can self-collect their own cemens and they pay for the truck transporting their cement. I think it's worth mentioning 2 clear advantages and the target that we have as well. Number one is the stickiness. You kind of lock up those customers. And number two, by doing that, you take advantage of their ability in certain regions to be more flexible, more agile and even faster than you. So we make sure that we partner with them to remove any obstacles to reach all corners of the country and the region. On a final note, let me just say that it's not only exciting, but logistically, logistics probably supported the growth of the company in the previous years. And once again, we are confident that we will continue to be the backbone of future growth for exportation and domestic markets for Dangote Cement. With that, let me call my colleague, Dr. Oy Kemi, that will cover the sustainability road, the sustainability journey for us today. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. I am [indiscernible], and I'm the Head of Sustainability at Dangote Cement. Over the past 14 years, I've been driving sustainability strategies across different sectors. And today, I'll be happy to discuss with you what our strategy is in terms of sustainability. Now considering all that you've heard since we started this program today, you must have heard some certain words that further enforces that sustainability is a recurring theme within our organization. You must have heard words like alternative worlds, localization, optimization, digitalization, all this speaks to how we've been able to institutionalize and operationalize sustainability in our operations. So what exactly is the Dangote Cement sustainability strategy? We call it the Dangote Cement 7-pillar approach. And this is just a framework that ensures that we are able to embed sustainability in everything we do. Being able to balance operational excellence, financial performance, environmental stewardship, economic empowerment, all driven by a robust governance structure is one of the ways that we have been achieving our sustainability strategies. We are not living out our people. So the cultural and the social pillars also ensures that we deliver long-term value for all our stakeholders. And this includes our customers, our employees, our investors, even the host communities and a wider range of shareholders and stakeholders as well. Now what are the key focal areas for our sustainability strategy? Number one, of course, is carbon emissions. We all know that the cement industry is a hard-to-abit sector. CO2 is inevitable, right? So we are quite aware of that, and we have committed to reduce our CO2 emissions by 20% by 2030, and that is no mean feat. We have looked at various areas in which we emit significant amounts of CO2, and we have put strategies in place to reduce them. One of them is the production of clinker. And just as GMD had said in his previous presentation, blended cement is one of the ways that we are reducing our CO2 production. We are also looking to develop a low-carbon product known as the LC3 cement that is a limestone calcined clay cement. And this will further drive down CO2 emissions because this type of cement can use up to 50% clinker and then substituted by other materials that work as well as having clinker in them. In terms of fuel, and we've talked quite extensively about the use of alternative fuels. in substituting for fossil fuels. So this will also drive down our CO2 emissions as well. In terms of energy efficiency, installation of solar plants across our locations as well as the deployment of waste heat recovery systems to reuse the heat that we emit from our processes, our strategies to reduce emissions in terms of energy efficiency. And then, of course, use of AI and technology as well to improve our efficiencies, our strategies in that regard. In terms of transportation, we've talked about CNG, electric vehicles. So these are ways that we are looking to decarbonize and reduce our CO2 emissions. So we have quite a lot of strategies in place. And of course, we have a road map to achieving our target for 2030 per year, per location and then as a group. In terms of our environmental impact, that is another core focal area. In terms of air emissions, in terms of water consumption, waste management, we have put strategies in place to recycle to ensure continuous monitoring of our metrics in terms of water, in terms of air, NOx, SOx and other air emissions as well as improving our energy efficiency as well. Thirdly, our focus on governance framework. Maintaining this is core and key to us. I mean we have a robust strategy in terms of governance, and I'll speak to that in our next slide. Workforce empowerment is key. Our people are quite important to us, and we have invested quite a lot in developing our employees. to ensure that we deliver operational excellence whilst also taking care of our people in terms of well-being, health and safety. And lastly, social investments. In as much as we desire to have the social license to operate, we also have to give back to the communities where we operate in. So we have supported communities in various areas such as infrastructure, education, empowerment, especially for vulnerable groups like youth and women as well as education. So the alternative project has actually been an outcome -- a successful outcome, I'll say, of deploying our sustainability strategy. It has offered us an alternative solution to fossil fuel, reducing dependency on it. significant cost reduction as well as an alternative pathway to waste management as an alternative to disposing waste into landfill. Some of the alternative flows that we have used are agricultural, industrial and municipal waste and the GMD also talked about the use of RDF, which we are also looking into. Since 2021, we have deployed a number of alternative feed-in systems across all our locations, and this just speaks to how much investments we have made in this project. And of course, we have gotten some cost savings as well. We have committed to reducing our TSR, which is the thermal substitution rate by 25% by 2030. Now the thermal substitution rate is the amount of energy that comes from alternative flows, which is used to substitute energy that will ordinarily come from fossil fuels. 25% we have targeted for 2030. Currently, we are at 9% as a group, but I'd like to say that across some of our locations, we are actually trending between 20% to 40%. The investment made in 2025 in mortnalitys, for example, is about USD 6 billion, and we have been able to get considerable cost savings of about $40 per tonne as of July this year. In terms of waste management, between 2022 and 2025, we have been able to increase the amount of waste that has been diverted from landfill by about 180%. And I think that is quite commendable. Now speaking to our governance framework. I've mentioned that this is one of our core strategies. Now we have a diverse Board composition. We have 13 members in number. One is the independent Chair and then we have a group GMD. Now these 2 entities are separate entities. The roles are separate entities. And then, of course, we have a mix of independent executive directors and nonindependent executive directors. In terms of diversity, we have several nationalities sitting on the Board, and we have a female representation of about 31%. Furthermore, we have subcommittees or committees, I'll say, that actually advise the Board on various matters as regards to the organization. and there is a committee dedicated especially to sustainability. And this has also helped to drive the sustainability initiatives. And also in addition to our governance framework, we have a robust repertoire of sustainability policies that also helps to drive this initiative across our business. And in terms of diversity as well, we have like a mixed blend of diverse experiences and qualifications as well, which has made the Board quite robust in driving this strategy across our business. As I said earlier, our workforce is core to ensuring that strategies are driven across in terms of operational excellence and then creating long-term value. We operate a culture of transparency and equality. And we are quite aware that there is a notion that the cement industry is a male-dominated industry, but we have initiatives aimed at accelerating female representation across the workforce and not just on the Board. We are highly committed to protecting our employees in terms of health and safety. And then to ensure adequate succession planning and developing a well-groomed and oiled talent pipeline for the future. We have various programs in place. We have the graduate training program for young graduates. We have the leadership development program, the by leadership program, and this is a program for leaders within the organization. We have a management training program, and this is training as well for mid-management employees. Our technical teams are not left out. We build our capacity in collaboration with international standards as well as our OEMs as well. So in a nutshell, we've been able to institutionalize and operationalize sustainability in our business. We do not see sustainability as a cost center. We actually see it as a risk management strategy that further as to derisk the business. Thank you very much. I'll hand over to the GM.

Thank you, [indiscernible]. And apology for running slightly late. So one request we have is can we skip the Q&A? We'll take it in the end. And we have a short break and come back in 15 minutes to the question. Thank you very much. We have assembly in the room, please. We are starting our next session. And in view of giving more time for the Q&A, what we intend to do is we straight away jump to financials. And to take us through the financials, I'll request my Group CFO, Mr. Dr. Gbenga, to come on the stage and run you through those data, please. Mr. Gbenga.

Thank you, sir. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Dr. Gbenga Fapohunda. I hope you can all hear me. Okay. My name is Dr. Gbenga Fapohunda. A little bit about myself. I joined the Dangote Group about 6 years ago, still counting. And in terms of background, ex KPMG Assurance, ex-PwC Financial Advisory, ex-CFO at British American Tobacco and ex-CFO at United P Service. So I'll take us through the finance numbers. Okay. The main message on this slide is that DCP's financial performance in the last 3.5 years have been exceptional. And I'll take us through the reasons. The first one is for revenue growth, we have CAGR of about 36%, which is largely driven by 2 key factors. One is volume growth; and two is price increase. And the price increase are influenced by 2 factors: inflation and exchange rate devaluation. Taking us to the next point, which is adjusted EBITDA. EBITDA grew by 45%, largely driven by 3 factors. The first factor is revenue growth. The second factor is operational efficiency and the third one is actually cost reduction initiatives. Taking us to the third point, which is an elevated 88% cash conversion ratio, and I'll take that from 2 perspectives. The first perspective is what are the key factors that have enabled us to deliver these outstanding numbers. The first one is our good cash flow. The second point is our good profitability margins. Now the question is this elevated good cash conversion ratios, what has it done for us as a business? It has done 3 things for us as a business. It has allowed us to continue to invest in our investment initiatives. One, it has helped us to good returns to our shareholders; and three, it has helped us to keep good liquidity. Going to the third point, which is good EBITDA margin of 43%, quite outstanding. This is a simple average for the last 3 years. Let me put a twist to it, and icing on the cake. As at December 2025, this 43% was actually 46%. And by H1 2026, this 43% average has gone to 47%. Coming back to our return on capital employed of 45%. This is largely driven by 2 key factors. One is a good profitability; and w is a good balance sheet discipline. Next slide. On this slide, the summary of it is BCP's proven track record of sustained growth over the last 10 years. I'll start with the graph on the first left. This graph actually shows that volume grew from 21.9 million tonnes to 29 million tonnes over a 10-year period. I'll bifurcate it into 2 eras. One era is a steep growth trajectory era. And the second one, I'll speak to it later. So you can see between 2019 and 2018, there was a steep growth, and this is largely driven by 2 factors. One factor is the expansion capacity we did at Sala, 3 million tonnes. The second one was the expansion we did in [indiscernible], another 3 million tonnes. That's the first era of extreme growth. The second era is a moderated era where we had economic challenges globally. So it was actually relatively flat from a volume perspective. Going to the column in the middle, you'll see volume increase from $407 million to $3.1 billion. That's actually been driven by 2 key factors. One is volume; two is price increases as a result of the elevation in inflation and exchange rate issues. Let's go back to EBITDA. EBITDA on a 3-year average CAGR period, the EBITDA growth is actually higher than that of revenue. This is largely due to 2 key factors. The first one is good cost discipline and the second point is good operational efficiency. That takes us to this slide. The main message on this slide is DCP's strong growth and margin expansion across different geographies. I'll start with -- start on the first left. This chart shows that volume has grown from 27.3 million tonnes to 29 million tonnes. The key side on this -- the key message on this is that it is largely being driven by Nigeria. You can see that Nigeria grew from 16.4 million tonnes to 18.4 million tonnes historically. However, Pan Africa actually provides a good diversification opportunity. And even though Pan Africa was relatively flat, you can see in 2026, there was a growth from 11 million tonnes to 11.8 million tonnes, representing 7% growth. In the middle column, we talk about revenue. Revenue grew from $1.4 billion to $3.1 billion. And this growth is actually represented 70% by Nigeria. However, there's an interesting side to it. You see Pan Africa, it increased. The red one is Pan Africa. The blue one is Nigeria. Pan Africa at $613 million increased by 60% to $1 billion, even though revenue was relatively -- I mean volume was relatively flat. In terms of EBITDA margin, looking at the cycle on top, our EBITDA margin as at 2023 was 40% -- this increased and got elevated to 46% in 2025. And by H1 2026, this became 47%. This slide talks about BCP's growth-oriented program being fueled by our expansion plans. And I'll take it from 2 perspectives. On the left, historical, on the right, medium-term future. I will start with the historical. From -- in 2023, our CapEx was $68 million, and this grew to $694 million. And overall, about 80% of this CapEx was actually expansion CapEx, okay? In the future, -- in the medium term, we intend to spend $4.5 billion on CapEx and over 80% of it will still be expansion CapEx. Now despite this expansion, we are still able to maintain good liquidity and pay good shareholder return on this. Next slide. This slide talks about our cash generation and returns profile. I want to talk first about the table below. we talk about our return on capital employed. Return on capital employed doubled in 2023 from 33% to 68% in 2026. And this is largely driven by the fact that the shareholder -- the DCP, which is the company is creating extreme value for its shareholders. I'll go to the table above it, which is our free cash flow. Now free cash flow actually improved and improved by about 250% from 2023, $534 million to $1.3 billion in 2026. Also Second on top, which is our cash conversion ratio at an elevated level of about 89%. This is outstanding and fantastic. What this has been able to do for us is provide enough liquidity, enough cash flow for us to do 2 things: one, continue our investment in initiatives; and two, provide good liquidity and good dividend to our shareholders. Before leaving this slide, I'd like to talk about one thing. The table to the extreme right, you can see 2.5 years average payback period for brownfield. Why this is very, very important is over 80% of our CapEx in the medium term is going to be brownfield. And it comes with reduced payback period, and that implies reduced return on capital employed for the business. This slide talks about our dividend profile, okay? And I'll start with the first one. Over the last 3.5 years, the business has been able to pay $1.2 billion as dividend to our shareholders. In fact, and between 2024 and 2025, dividend increased by 50%. Also, in terms of what does it mean like in terms of outlook, we will get to that in the guidance section. But despite this good dividend profile, we are still able to invest in the future of the business and retain very good liquidity. This slide talks about our leverage and financing position. I will start with the very first one, which is our net debt. As of 2023, our net debt was $345 million. By H1 2026, this has improved to a net cash position of $142 million, okay? Now I go to our net leverage ratios. I will start with this net leverage of 0.6x. The definition of this net leverage is actually net debt-to-EBITDA ratio. It was 0.6x as of 2023. By 2025, it had increased to -- it has improved to 0.3x. And by H1 2026, it had improved to negative 0.1x, giving us significant legroom for the future expansion we want to do while returning good returns to our shareholders. Following the same trajectory, we have our interest coverage ratio. 2023 at 2.4x. This improved in 2025 to 5.0x. And by H1 2026, this became 8.1x. Now what does this table tell us? The summary of this table is telling us what are the key drivers of our capital allocation. And on 4 fronts. The first one is maintaining our solid competitive advantage where we are. The second one is expansion CapEx. And the third one is returning good -- making good returns to our shareholders. While the fourth one is about community investment and relating to returning to our external environment. I will start with the first one, maintaining our current existing asset base. We've talked about a couple of interesting things, which are a competitive advantage, which I'll try not to repeat because my colleagues have dealt on that. The first one is the CNG infrastructure. I refer to it as the CNG industry was virtually built by DCP. We need to defend this competitive advantage. Number two is our 5 captive power plants. Everything was built, not dependent on government, another competitive advantage, which we need to defend and continue to work with. Our backbone, 10,000 shops. No company in Sub-Saharan Africa has that asset. 10,000 trucks, which allows us to go into the [indiscernible] and cranes and deliver products to customers where our competitors cannot do that, we need to protect. Our huge reserves that last us for 80 years. Let me give you context about this. An average company, particularly in developed markets, have limestone reserves for about 30 to 40 years. We have for 80 years, 4.2 billion metric tonnes reserves. In terms of expansion, over the medium term, we intend to invest $4.5 billion in expansion. And we intend to increase capacity by 45%. In terms of shareholder return, we paid $1.2 billion as dividend to our shareholders in the last 3.5 years. And we actually increased dividend by 50% as well. In terms of return on capital employed, we are at 45%. This slide summarizes our competitive advantage. And I'm not going to spend too much time on this because my colleagues have actually dealt with us. However, what I'll try to do is I'll bring out the finance implication of each of this and why you would see that we are getting premium margins ahead of competition. So I'll start with the very first one, huge limestone reserves 80 years. That's where everything starts from will be a cement company. Ahead of peers, industry average 30 to 40 years. Scale advantage. Where this ties to finance is my fixed cost per tonne. If my computer has 50% or 1/3 of my capacity, my fixed cost per tonne actually reduces by about 70%. So from a fixed cost per tonne advantage, I have an advantage ahead of my competitors just because of scale, right? The second point is CNG and alternative fuel. Giving a background to this, about 50%, 55% of my cost is either energy and oilage. So between that, I have 60% of my cost. Now CNG cost, we found a way to reduce it by over 60%. We actually build the infrastructure in most of our markets. For alternative fuel as well, alternative fuel usage versus gas versus diesel is actually another 60% to 70%. So taking the biggest cost component of my cost and tackling it gives me another advantage ahead of scale. Going to the next one, which is people and organization. This sounds like an HR point. But I'll tell you where finance comes into it and where my competitive advantage and cost savings comes from that. Underneath this people and organization, we have what my colleagues and my MD have spoken about, which is query to customer. Underneath this is a process. We have mines, we have production and we have logistics. What has happened to us is we developed this competence in-house to be able to manage and do these activities ourselves. Online competition, they either outsource, either the mining or the logistics. By outsourcing, they've outsourced 15% to 20% of the margins to third parties. We retain that in-house. So if you ask why do we have more LD margins than our competition, that's one of it. The next point is pricing power. We'll see a slide that shows that as inflation is rising, my average selling price is rising. The import of that is that I can successfully transfer and I've done it consistently, transfer all these costs from inflation, from exchange rate devaluation back to the customers. And that is what you see as cost pass-through track record. I'll talk about protection from imports. And this comes from 2 fronts. The first one is actually a routine. The second one is a structural advantage. So I'll start with the first one. In many countries in Africa, government has actually written a lot to say, at this point, we have sufficient limestone to make ourselves self-sufficient. Consequently, on banning import outrightly, written documentation. So that protects us. But for some other markets, it's just a structural advantage, whereby anybody importing clinker, importing limestone, whatever product into the country, even cement structurally has a disadvantage from both a transport perspective, a cost perspective and a tariff perspective. So that's a structural protection that, that gives us in some of our markets. I've spoken about captive logistics, and I'll talk about multi filling system. Where this comes to play and gives a superior margin to us versus competition is this. To run it a cement plant, you need energy, which is about 50%, 40% of your cost. You can either use gas, you can use diesel, you can use LPFO, you can use alternative fuel or other sources of fuel. Our equipment is actually tailored to actually use any of these sources. Let me tell you why it is a competitive advantage for us. Unlike our competitors, we actually have conditioned our machines to be able to use any of this. So at any point in time, we can always switch to the cheapest one. I'll give you an example. Many years ago, AGO was the cheapest. We switched. Later, gas became the cheapest, we switched. Later, AI became the cheapest, we shifted. But our competitors, because they don't have this competence in terms of their machine capacity, they cannot extract this value from the biggest cost item in their books. Because of time, I'll move to the guidance section. I will start with the very first one on revenue. On revenue, 2025, we finished with NGN 4.3 trillion. And from a guidance perspective, 2026, we expect a 25% increase, and we're on track to deliver that in 2026. Aspirationally, in the medium term, we expect this to go up to between NGN 11 trillion and NGN 11.5 trillion. Going to the next table on the right is our adjusted EBITDA. We finished an adjusted EBITDA of NGN 2 trillion in 2025. We expect this to increase by our sustainable margins, which we spoke about earlier. In 2026, we are on course to deliver that. From a medium-term perspective into the future, there are 2 factors. The first one is our sustainable margin. And the second one is based on the improvements we are getting on the cost savings we are getting to get a middle-digit single percentage increase on that to give us an expected figure in the medium term. Now before leaving this slide, I would like to talk about something interesting, our Pan-African business. Our expectation is that our Pan-African business is going to deliver 20% of our EBITDA into the medium term. This slide talks about a couple of other expectations and guidances. I would start with depreciation and amortization. For depreciation and amortization, the expectation is actually for it to be a percentage of revenue. And our expectation is as we deploy our CapEx, we expect this amount to go to 7% to 9% as we approach the last 2 years of medium term. Also, net working capital is supposed to follow that same trend. We expect it to be a percentage of revenue. And as we still up sales due to our CapEx expansion, we expect it to be 7% to 9% of sales of revenue going into medium term. Now coming to CapEx, the first thing is, as you all know, CapEx has been in our D&A coming from the slide I showed you, historical, over 80% has been expansion CapEx. Going into the future, 80% expansion CapEx. We intend to maintain this trajectory into the future. Our maintenance CapEx is expected to be about 3% of revenue, mainly driven by the fact that we have relatively newer plants than each plant that is available in the industry. And the most important part is our plans to spend $4.5 billion as CapEx into the medium term. What does it cut? 50% of this CapEx spend is supposed to be in the last 2 years of the medium term. In terms of taxation, historically, how do you predict the future, you predict future from the past. We have 34% tax rate. We intend to keep that going into the future. This slide talks about our dividend policy and our leverage policy. I would start with the dividend policy. Historically, as you know, we paid very healthy dividend. We are known to pay good dividends. And this is based on the strength of our cash flow without impeding our investment objectives. In terms of dividend policy, management and Board actually have a policy going forward that we will pay a minimum of 80% of our profit after tax as dividend into the future. Coming to our leverage guidance. The most important point in our leverage guidance is that we would operate comfortably below 1.5x within the horizon period within the medium term. However, despite that, we are going to ensure that we maintain our balance sheet discipline as we've always maintained it, and we intend to maintain that into the future. Thank you very much. We'll go to Q&A. Thank you.

Good afternoon. I would apt to have Dr. Gbenga post lunch. Now we go into the Q&A. Can we have the questions for us, which I will be assisted by my team, depending upon the subject, they will help me out with the answers. Can we first start with the questions in the room?

[indiscernible] from JPMorgan. Thanks a lot for your very detailed and helpful. So maybe I'll ask, first of all, about a little bit of color about the regulatory environment in Nigeria to start with. I mean, we read sometimes about some price fixing allegation, some of the antitrust maybe issues. If you can help us a little bit understanding the country risk and some of regulatory risk and pricing in particular, first question.

Can you repeat that question? Can you repeat that question?

Do you want me to repeat the question?

Maybe I'll come there.

Just the regulatory environment in Nigeria. Sometimes we have read articles lately about price fixing allegation. So maybe if you can give us a bit of color about that.

Thank you. A very good question, I think. Could you raised this. You have to understand that we are operating in an emerging market. And in the emerging market, we have some of these things coming up, especially when the elections are near, and we are in for a major election during the year. Having said that, we have received a letter, and we have been cooperating with the government and whatever required information has been furnished. And as of now, there is no further development on the subject.

Okay. Maybe my second question is about how you think about pricing. And I think you mentioned earlier that pricing has come down in Nigeria because you have making it -- making cement more affordable to your customers. But at the same time, we heard from the CFO that pricing is a function of cost or at least it's a pass-through. So can you help us understand how pricing dynamics work generally and how you see that going in the future?

Fine. I think again, let me complement you on that. The only difference is there is an issue regarding the timings that we are talking. We are comparing a statement which was made for the era before the local production was adequate enough to meet the requirement. wherein there was a shortage, there was an import of cement. What Dr. Gbenga was mentioning of the era when we had sufficient cement production, we had multiple players in the country. In this environment, as is true with any environment, the pricing is basically a function of multiple factors. There's no one singular factor. Primarily, it is a supply-demand equation in the market. It also depends upon affordability of the customer. It also depends upon how the competitiveness in the market, the cost of production, the dollar parity that you have, suppose is dollar dependent and sort of inflation. So there's no one single formula that we work it out. What we focus is on that we create margin, not banking our horses on pride, we look at what we can do to reduce our cost. So we have a very extensive cost reduction program. We are seeing that every place what we emphasized was on the cost. We have been bringing efficiency in everything that we do. So once we have done that, then we have insulated ourselves practically from such measures.

Can I ask also about the recent divestment of Holcim Nigerian assets to Huaxin? Is that something that could potentially change the dynamics in terms of the competitive environment in your view?

As in principle, we try to focus more on what is within our control, okay? We have very little or currently no control on what our other players in the market do. Having said that, we had a competitor in the name of Holcim, now it is some other Huaxin. For us, all competitors are alike, and we try to look at it, we do it internally.

As a follow-up question to pricing, if we take a very simplistic view across the next year or 2 on the expected capacity expansion that you mentioned, so we could say that ultimately, supply is going up will grow at a steady pace. So we should see some downward pressure at least in Nigeria given the strong capacity expansion that we are forecasting there.

Our growth predominantly will come from volume. That is we are expanding. We are going to around 80 million tonnes capacity. We are adding 25 million tonnes capacity. Predominantly is going to come from the growth. It's going to come from the volume. And as far as the price are concerned, as I explained to you, one of our indexes that we monitor is on the dollar parity. And though it is not entirely quickly resetable, currency depreciates and you go and increase the price. It takes time for some stability to come in the market. You will see changes on account of that. But if you look at it over a historical trend in the dollar terms, there is practically some amount of narrow band in which we operate. So we will continue to have dollar parity and as far as the inflation correction.

And you -- one of the slides mentioned that you guys are seeing yourself as a consolidator in the space. So where do you see the biggest potential opportunity in terms of M&A outside of Nigeria? If you could tell us a bit more about the structure of the market fragmented and potential basically.

If you look at the first step that DCP took in the cement business was through an acquisition, that was a in cement, right? We have been always be open and we keep on evaluating the various options that comes to us. And primarily, we have some compulsorily, you may say, funneling process and any acquisition proposal or merger proposal comes to has to fulfill those requirements. Like we talked about in a different point of time, it should be able to have a potential for scale. It should be a potential to bring in efficiencies, the cost to serve the market. Unfortunately, no such opportunity came forward, but this is nothing unusual. You have only seen one program. Every strategy document that we prepare in DCP, we have a system in which we prepare a strategy every year. And we have a rolling plan, in which do -- we always keep a provision or window open for merger and acquisition. There is no definitive target. It has to make a business sense with the asset footprint that we have. We should make sure that we are sub-Saharan players focused primarily on that. lease cost to serve. If we get an opportunity, we are...

I'm Migala from UBS. A few questions from me as well. The first one was on the retail and non-retail mix in the business as it sits today. Is there differences in profitability between those 2 channels, customers that you look at? And when you think about the medium-term targets you set, is there an assumption that you're making in terms of how the markets mature over time?

See, the ratio that you direct asked a question of our customers and retail market. Being a Dangote Cement for the attributes that we possess and what we are looking for is the brand equity and the premium product that we have. Our preference is to lean towards the retail market. Having said that, we are also a responsible corporate citizen. We know the infrastructure, the development, that is the corporate sector. But unfortunately, in this area in which we operate, relatively the percentage of that is small, but we enjoy a very high percentage of market share as far as the corporate sector is concerned, but magnitude-wise, it is small. To give you a straight answer, let's say, if I give an example of Nigeria, it would be around 16% to 84%. But what we see significant differences, and that stems from, again, when we are talking of generational buildup and we are best equipped with our infrastructure of silos that we have and the bulk cement capacity, plus the variability of the cement that we possess, we are the best positioned to serve the infrastructure upbeat. And over the last 2, 3 years, we have seen the phenomenal growth in this infrastructure segment that is commercial. And we expect this segment to grow faster, and we are well equipped to meet that requirement.

The second question I had was on the export market. You also which of the export market you...

Have I heard you correctly saying that which are the markets that we are targeting for exports?

No, no, in terms of the additional infrastructure that you're laying down, you probably have a target penetration that you want to...

As we do it in a normal any strategy document, there is a GDP growth and there are some established multipliers for the market to grow. We do forecast in the various markets what is likely to be the total pie of the cement market. And then knowing our capability and competitiveness to be able to supply, we work out a revised target, and we accordingly work as per that. And obviously, in this segment, the ones which are in the market, which is closer to our own area of operations are better equipped to serve.

And maybe last question from me is, I think in the initial slide, you talked about not just cement, but the opportunity to expand to other [indiscernible]. Can you touch a little bit more on that? Is that sort of...

We have a lot of -- I think good question. You raised that point with some of the things that covered in the part, and we compressed it so that we can meet the time line and do the Q&A. A, we see a great improvement, as I said, in the infrastructure segment or the commercial segment, for which we are -- capacity-wise, we are equipped to deliver that. But extension of that would be some of these areas that we are talking of ready-mix, et cetera. To incubate this concept and to get the in-house expertise, we have plenty of in-house projects and mega projects, which go on. So ready-mix operations, we have already tried and put something in place in those projects. Now with this tried and tested and refined business model, we have to just roll it out. So I would say it is more nearer than in the midterm.

Ben Martin from Goldman Sachs. My first question was on, I guess, some of the points you made today around margin advantage, your business versus some of your peers talking about channel and technology. Is there any way that you could quantify how big do you think that advantage is your business relative to your peers? I don't know if it's a basis points on margin or maybe a dollar per tonne advantage that you think you have versus the industry?

As we said, a very good question that you asked related to the market, which is the USP for the Dangote Cement. And what we do anything and we obviously try to cross check with what is that benefit that it is. Now what thing cumulatively is related in all the sales and distribution and the product quality is the brand equity. And brand equity would vary from a market to market, again, as you said. Basically, it will also do competitiveness, what is the supply demand, what is the type of product demand. So to answer your question in a very simplistic number will be difficult. We can only say it's quite a handsome premium brand that you get compared to our competitors.

That makes a lot of sense. And maybe just on the export strategy, it's interesting to hear about the 10 million tonne target that you have. Could you break that down by some of the key markets that you hope to grow as a percentage of that 10 million tonnes, which is, I guess, the key countries that you expect to be part of that 10 million number?

Fine. Very good. This 10 million is the total export that we talk of, basically 8 million to 10 million, say that. So what we have planned, this includes cement, it includes clinker market. And in clinker, there are again 2 segments we have. One is the in-house requirement and second is the external customers. We have a new house requirement in the terms of like we have got Ghana, we have put up a grinding unit. We have got Ivory Coast. We've got Cameroon so and so forth. And if you look into our 80 MTPA plant, there are some more coming in like sierra Leone getting converted from a bulk terminal. Some of the capacity expansions in the country, for example, Cameroon, when it expands, it will consume more of clinker. Senegal also there is a plant when it grows, we'll not correspondingly increase clinker, we'll take there. So a whole lot of things are there. So a very sizable percentage of it could be around 60% would come from our in-house, which ultimately leads to the market and thereafter from there. The balance 40 million is a mixture of third-party customers and from the cement market that we have. Cement market predominantly is the market with of the adjoining countries in wherever it is. For example, Zambia, we go to DRS, Congo, we go to some other countries. We go to Senegal, other countries. And for Nigeria, the biggest way is we go to Benin and Togo and Ghana. So there's a multi to give a breakup of it may not be possible at this stage.