Geoffrey White, the CEO of Agility Africa is an expert on infrastructure development, retail supply chains, agri-business and investment in African markets. He currently leads Agility Africa, a leading global provider of logistics and related infrastructure solutions for the oil and gas and FMCG markets and also manages $5bn in revenue, 22,000 employees and office in more than 100 global locations.
To date he has commented on Africa for the BBC, CNN CNBC, Forbes the Royal Institute for International Affairs and the World Economic Forum.
He sits down with us to share his insights on the pragmatic investment role Agility is playing in Africa.
VA: Can you give us a bit more background around the 70 infrastructure hubs Agility will be investing in across the continent – especially in the light of Africa having more than 15 percent of the world natural resources and yet slim on the downstream and supply chain models?
GW: At the end of last year we signed off on a new strategy and Agility has been operating in Africa for the last 60 years, meaning we understand and have empathy with the market and the opportunities.
Agility is a global company with $5.5bn revenue and we distribute all around the world. We have been very project focused in Africa until the end of last year. At the end of last year we thought there is a clear opportunity to build and invest in infrastructure in the continent and create a number of Agility distribution parks (or Logistic Distribution Parks) – the ideal size of each will be 100 acres and we have already identified 70 locations that we will develop over the next five years. So this is a five year project that will create 10 million square meters of warehousing on the continent and comes in at around $4bn in investment.
What it is really driven by is our global customer network that has bought into the opportunities in Africa, understanding the growth of the customer base on the continent from one to two billion consumers by and is looking for that missing link, the route market of world class and international standards. Already we as Agility have 21 million square meters of logistics parks around the world, with the concept to replicate this business model into Africa. Without saying then, when our clients in Singapore, London and New York, we can offer them the same world-class services they already receiving.
The first project has been sign this past December and under construction in Ghana, we’re very bullish about Ghana as a market with opening planned for Q4 this year and already signing in tenants. We also bring what we define as our service level agreement, so when you come into an Agility Logistics Park the power will never go off, the ICT will never go down and it will be a secure environment.
VA: South Africa’s FMCG’s sector is shining at the moment. Are you taking South African companies into the rest of Africa through your logistics parks or are there new companies being set up in respective countries?
GW: So it’s kind of interesting – there are three client profiles. There is big existing multi-nationals, who want to come into Africa as a continent; there is clear demand from South African companies who are expanding very quickly northwards seeking cold chain and warehousing as they expand into the rest of Africa and the third type of client are local companies that find it difficult to raise capital to build their own infrastructure.
For example one of the first clients coming into Ghana was going to build themselves a warehouse for $5m, we are now building that for him against a lease and where he had to raise the capital to build the infrastructure and pay 29% interest, we are now incurring this investment. Instead the client can now invest in growing the business instead and use our infrastructure.
More interestingly is when you build a route to market you are also building a route from market, acting as a gateway from African agricultural produce and manufacturers to get an efficient and cost-effective and international standard to go to market as well.
VA: Africa has lack of infrastructure and opportunity – how many of the land-locked African countries is Agility investing in?
GW: We investing in 70 different locations across the continent where we are building capability so it does not always come at once. This capacity is to reach all the major population densities from North Africa to South Africa
VA: Because Agility is global and you obviously operating in other emerging markets, what are key lessons you bring a=or are using for investing in Africa?
GW: I think everybody may have the same answer…people…people…people. One of the aspects we have been very focused on from the beginning is creating really good quality local content, and employees and training and skills development and transfer. For example we have just launching a project on Coite’d Voire. We had a team from that country at our global office training and bring them up to the Agility standard of operations of excellence and now they have gone back to run the business. We have done the same go Ghana with a great football analogy called “Goal” – which is the ‘Goal’ to grow our African leaders taking them into our operations in Singapore or Dubai, mentor them and give them the skills as managers that the business needs in their respective countries for Agility.
VA: Lastly, you say there will never be lights out or ICT down-time in any Agility logistics park – how are you going about that?
GW: You have redundancy over redundancy – so you have mains power which we know is not that reliable in Africa, so we have back-up generators and we then back-up the “back-up” generators.
There are locations in Africa where you can connect reliably locally for interconnectivity, but we set up satellite dishes in each location and clients connect directly via satellite with VSAT direct links.
But it is more than just that, as part of our business and what we do all around the world is you have automatic traceability and visibility of the goods going through the Agility logistics network. To this extent we need to be able to tack our goods at any one time.
VA: You are global investing on the continent – how many of your clients off the continent do you foresee investing through your continental network?
GW: We did a fair bit of research before we started and we believe that every CEO’s office and boardroom has a plan for how they are going to go and access the African market. At least 95% of our global client-base have a plan to enter the African market and the reticence of execution is that we cannot do it properly. So if we can build the template and infrastructure to do it responsibly and properly then they are desperate to come.
