CAMAC, a United-States based Nigerian-owned company is being touted to become one of the first fully African-owned oil company to be publicly listed in an African stock exchange market, Empowered Newswire reported on Saturday. Oil industry sources in the US have said CAMAC, which has affiliates in Nigeria and South Africa, is highly speculated to be mulling a debut in the public market in Africa as the first fully African-owned upstream oil company to be listed in an African stock exchange.
According to the wired media, sources said that debut, when it sails through, may occur in Nigeria, where currently no oil company is publicly listed.
Said the source, ”Nigeria is one of the few nations where oil, its main source of wealth is not publicly listed.” It is believed that such a listing could further boost the Nigerian Stock Exchange and add value to the continent‘s stock market. Indeed CAMAC‘s Nigeria‘s affiliate, Allied Energy, in 1992 was the first indigenous oil company to hold a Nigerian deepwater license as an operator, and the company also entered into a technical services agreement with British Petroleum and Statoil of Norway. Later in 1998 CAMAC‘s affiliate in Nigeria, Allied Energy in partnership with BP and Statoil became the first oil consortium to spud a deepwater well in West Africa and the first to discover oil in deepwater in West Africa According to a US industry analyst Jim Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch and Associates, a provider of oil industry research, says ”Getting into the oil business, at least in the production and exploration sectors that CAMAC has managed to work its way into, requires a huge amount of capitalization, and they‘ve done a good job at raising and growing the capital.” The analyst quoted by the Black Enterprise magazine added that CAMAC, a 22-year old firm founded by Lawal, 54, ”looks like a good, solid, growing company. It‘s very impressive.” Meanwhile, CAMAC has retained its rating as a leading black-owned business in America. Leading US business newsmagazine-Black Enterprise in its 2008 ratings of US black-owned business released in the US in its June edition rated CAMAC, Houston-based but owned by Nigerian born Dr. Kase Lawal, as the second leading firm of the top 100 companies rated. The Chairman and Chief Excecutive Officer of the publication, Earl G. Graves and Earl G. Graves, Jr. in a joint statement noted what they called CAMAC‘s ”outstanding business achievement.” This year‘s listing is the magazine‘s special 36th anniversary of listing America‘s most successful African-American-owned companies. Lawal, now in his early 50s, was born and raised in Ibadan and attended Lagelu Grammar School for his secondary education before he travelled to the US in 1972 for his university education. The influential US business magazine puts CAMAC‘s total revenues at $1.6B, coming second only to World Wide Technology, a systems integrator, technology and supply chain solutions firm. Three other US media publications have rated CAMAC highly in recent times. For instance Forbes in its ratings of top US private companies ranked the firm 272 of all billionaire dollar firms in the US. The list ran up to 400 in the 2006 edition. In Texas, the leading newspaper Houston Chronicle rated the Nigerian-owned business as number 8 on the list of the top ten privately owned companies in Houston, Texas. Houston is the 6th largest metropolitan area in the US. America‘s only national newspaper USA Today had reported that CAMAC ”has prospered by zeroing in on difficult environments, including Nigeria, where militants in recent months intensified their attacks on oil facilities and kidnapped foreign workers, and ... Venezuela, home to anti-American President Hugo Chavez.” In the last few years CAMAC has held down top rankings mostly the second place of the top 100 black-owned businesses in the US. In 2006 for instance, the revenues of the company was listed as $1.5B. The previous year the company achieved a 51% revenue growth. In 1999, the revenue totaled $114M. Since 2002 when it clinched over a billion in revenue, Black Enterprise for that year declared CAMAC ”as the largest African-American owned corporation in the United States, then the company became the second black owned company to reach the billion dollar mark as at then CAMAC, a crude oil and gas exploration firm is based in Houston, Texas with affiliates and subsidiaries in Colombia, Venezuela, South Africa and Nigeria. A former Mayor of Houston, one of America‘s largest cities, Lee P. Brown, who is now a member of the CAMAC‘s board of directors commended the Nigerian born company founder Dr. Lawal saying he has ”developed relationships not only in this country-US, but in other parts of the world.”
