The Nigerian Industrial Behemoth That Could Reshape the African Economy

Earlier in August, it was reported that Nigeria's Dangote Refinery secured a $1 billion underwriting for its upcoming stock market listing, which is set to become Africa's largest IPO. Indeed, the whole the continent has seen lots of economic growth in the last few years: According to the United Nations, growth across Africa was expected to reach 4.0% in 2026. The history of economic development on the continent is a vexed one; access to critical resources, whether its minerals or petrochemicals, has not always equated to improved economic conditions. To understand what is going on in Africa, we talk to Joe Studwell, the author of How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World's Last Developmental Frontier. The product of a decade of reporting, Studwell's book argues that African countries, in many instances, have failed to adopt development strategies (an industrial policy that favors export manufacturing for instance) that mirror Asian counterparts. And while development has been uneven, Studwell is optimistic that the seeds of sustained development are increasingly taking root, at least in some countries. We speak to Studwell about the Dangote IPO, why development has historically been so difficult, Rwanda's dreams of becoming Africa's Singapore, and why Lagos is one of the most impressive cities in the world. Read more: Dangote Offers East Africa Nations 30% Stake in New Refinery https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-21/dangote-offers-east-african-nations-30-stake-in-new-refinery?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article T. Rowe Price Says Nigeria Attractive Even After 64% Stock Rally https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-21/t-rowe-price-says-nigeria-attractive-even-after-64-stock-rally?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News http://bloomberg.com/ subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast Subscribe to the Odd Lots Newsletter http://bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots https://discord.gg/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Joe Weisenthal?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next. About the time it takes to grab a coffee. So, search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So, all the source materials, briefs and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful, can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 1:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello, Odd Lots listeners. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 1:50Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 1:51Joe Weisenthal?

  We're the hosts of the Odd Lots Podcast, and we've got something exciting for you.

• 1:55Tracy Alloway?

  That's right. So, one of the best parts of hosting our podcast is we get to actually meet and interact with our listeners. And we know we have some listeners over in Los Angeles.

• 2:04Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. So, if you're in LA, we're going to be recording a live show, some live recordings, at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood on September 17.

• 2:13Tracy Alloway?

  We have some really exciting guests lined up, have some really great conversations planned. So, go ahead and get your tickets. You can find those over at Bloomberg dot com forward slash Odd Lots, or click the link below in the show notes and come and say hi when you're there.

• 2:32Speaker 04

  Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:53Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Uh, I don't know what it is, Tracy. Uh, I kind of have this urge to do a Africa trip. Like, I sort of want to go to some of these capitals, Lagos, Accra, Kigali and so forth. Like, I don't know. I'm like, I've never been there and now I'm like, I'm kind of curious.

• 3:10Tracy Alloway?

  Well, you know, the urge to explore Africa is well documented among, uh, the history of, of men, of white men in particular, Joe. So, really, you're just following your instinct here, I guess. Yeah. Um, I've been to Africa, various places. Uh, Morocco, Egypt, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, briefly. I have some insane stories I could tell you, uh, but probably the one thing that stands out to me is the diversity of that particular continent, obviously. So, Egypt is very, very different to a place like Mozambique. And I will say, you know, like, I saw some, some, a lot of development in places like South Africa, Egypt, to some extent.

• 3:52Tracy Alloway?

  Mozambique was one of the poorest places I've ever seen in my life, to the point where a lot of people don't even want money. They would just barter for goods, like an extra T-shirt in your luggage or something like that.

• 4:03Joe Weisenthal?

  It is pretty extraordinary, just generally, you know. I think there was, if you had gone back 50 years ago or something like that, you would have had this view that, you know, countries around the world, over time, converge economically, particularly in a world of free trade, the factories chase the countries that have the cheapest labor, et cetera. And therefore, everyone in a world of free trade, you get this sort of like broad growth in wealth. But the, the extremes, you know, of outcomes over the last several decades has been, uh, truly extraordinary.

• 4:38Tracy Alloway?

  Absolutely. So, you have places like Nigeria, like Lagos, I think you mentioned, which seems to some extent be booming at the moment with higher oil prices. You have a very, very big IPO coming down the line.

• 4:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. So, this is what, uh, I'm particularly interested in. Um, we had a, I met a listener, a predecessor of mine, a doctor, when we were in London a couple of years ago, and he's like, oh, you guys really have to do an episode on this new oil refinery that's being, that's being built in Nigeria. We, and I say, anyway, this is for him. I hope he's listening at this point because-

• 5:13Tracy Alloway?

  It took two years, but we're doing it.

• 5:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Doing it because we, there's the news today that, um, Dangote Refinery, or sorry, the news this week, we were recording this August 20th, came out earlier in the week that they had secured $400 million ahead of planned IPO, that there's a 1 billion in backing from a few other firms. And also that the founder of this company, he's also, I believe, you know, he's one of the richest people in the world. And I don't think Dangote is anywhere close to being a household name.

• 5:44Tracy Alloway?

  No, and it's going to be the biggest stock market listing in African history ever. So, we should definitely talk about it. And I think it's good to talk about it in the context of why development in Africa has or hasn't happened in certain cases.

• 5:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Absolutely. Well, I'm very excited to say we really do have the perfect guest, someone we've never talked to on the podcast before, but it was probably an error because someone who's out writing and thinking has been very influential to people of our cohort over the last several years who are interested in things like industrial policy and so forth. We are going to be speaking with Joe Studwell, Senior Fellow at the Africa Urban Lab, Senior Visiting Fellow at ODI Global, and the author of the recent book, How Africa Works. And of course, many readers, uh, may have read his previous book, How Asia Works, talking about how some of these East Asian economies got as wealthy as they did. So, Joe, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  Oh, well, thank you for having me.

• 6:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's start with the simple question, what is this company Dangote and who is the founder?

• 6:49Speaker 05

  So, Alika Dangote is from Kano in the north of Nigeria. He's a Muslim trader, archetypal Muslim trader. He, um, grew up trading soft commodities, got a substantial business doing that. And then he went under the presidency of Obasanjo, um, to the government and negotiated a deal where he'd get four years of protection as the, as a monopoly importer of cement, which was not then made in Nigeria, in return for creating, um, local cement production. And he did that. Uh, but not only did he do that, he went on to do it across Africa.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  Uh, he's in a dozen countries doing cement now, and he's beaten, um, in most places, um, the multinational cement producers like the, the Swiss Holcim and whatever, who, who did, who previously dominated the business. So, he, that was the first thing that he did that people really kind of sat up and said, wow, this guy has got something. And, um, then he decided to do something much bigger. And he decided he would, uh, build a, an oil refinery in a country where a couple of times previously, government had tried to, to, to develop refining capacity, and it was just a disaster, an industrial policy disaster.

• 8:11Speaker 05

  Um, Dangote did it. He spent $20 billion. It's, uh, east of Lagos, a huge, huge plant.

• 8:20Speaker 05

  And it worked. It is working. And not only that, he's expanding it, um, now. So, in the course of doing that, he became, uh, the richest guy in Africa. But he doesn't, uh, stop because he's developed such capability in terms of project management and project delivery that he just goes on to other things. So, uh, next to his, um, oil refinery is a very large urea plant, fertilizer plant, which is now supplying the majority of fertilizer consumed in Nigeria. And he's, um, recently signed up, uh, to do the same thing in, um, in Ethiopia, the second most populous African country after Nigeria.

• 9:04Speaker 05

  Um, and yeah, he just keeps, uh, rolling forward. And so, this listing, I think, will be, will be pretty heavily oversubscribed because it's investor access to the first real quality, um, listed industrial asset pack, um, in, in, in, on the continent.

• 9:26Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I have a, this is just, um, a sort of tangential question, but you mentioned that he was first in cement production. Why does cement production seem to be such a thing in developing nations in particular? Such that if you go to a place like Nigeria or like Myanmar, you will see a lot of ads for different cement brands, and it feels like everyone is producing cement.

• 9:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, because it's so fundamental to development. I mean, uh, development is about investment, construction, creation of physical assets, and, and so cement is just absolutely fundamental.

• 10:03Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, uh, a serious question now then. So, what does the Dangote example actually say about, I guess, the diversification prospects for Africa? Because when I think, okay, it's a petroleum refinery that, you know, urea production, that's kind of industrialized, but it's also very connected to resources, right? And we've all heard about the resource curse. We know that various African nations have experienced it to some extent throughout time. So, how much of this is actually an industrial success story versus like kind of more of the same?

• 10:41Speaker 05

  Um, I would say it's different to what we saw in the past in Africa. So, Africa has a reputation for having tons and tons of hydrocarbons and minerals, uh, resources. It's not really true, actually. Um, we just perceive Africa that way because in the past, there wasn't much other, um, economic activity. So, it seemed like, um, minerals and hydrocarbons were dominant. But if you compare it with somewhere like the, the United States and you look at what, um, African countries have got, it's nothing, nothing like, uh, the, the mineral and hydrocarbon resources as a share of GDP.

• 11:17Speaker 05

  Um, so I would say that it's, it's different to what we had in the past because- You look at all of Dangote's businesses and it's really a demand driven story. And what I mean there is that the growth of population and the growth of population density in Africa is now creating markets, particularly urban markets of a type that we just didn't have before. And so you build your cement plants and the demand for what you're producing is just massively greater than it was in the past, the same for refined oil products, the same for fertilizer. Africa as a continent now has 1.5 billion people.

• 12:00Speaker 05

  That's about the same population density as Asia in 1960. So it's still not very densely populated, but it is when you compare it with immediately after the Second World War, when Africa had 220 million people. So it's gone from 220 million to 1.5 billion. And when after the Second World War, Africa had 220 million people, that was the same population density as Europe in 1500. And that to me is the fundamental reason why you didn't have a lot of economic growth.

• 12:31Joe Weisenthal?

  How does population density per se play an important role in a country's capacity to industrialize?

• 12:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, for all the reasons that you would expect, I've already talked about markets, you've got to have markets for what you're going to produce, particularly urban markets are very important, urban markets are also important because cities produce most of the tax that is that is paid in in any in any country. Then you've got to think about infrastructure. Every society requires a lot of investment in infrastructure. The cost of infrastructure is determined fundamentally on a per capita basis, or its affordability is determined on a per capita basis. Until you've got the people, you're not going to be able to afford it. And then there are questions of division of labor. When you get concentrated populations in cities, you get much better division of labor,

• 13:22Speaker 05

  much greater specialization, and in turn you get much greater creativity.

• 13:28Speaker 05

  So, you know, the famous statistic that's always rolled out is that 80% of GDP around the world is created in cities.

• 13:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 13:39Speaker 05

  Even though they don't occupy that much physical space. In the in the Africa book, I use the example of the UK where one city, London, generates 70% of the UK's fiscal surplus. You have London and the southeast region of the UK are the only two parts of the UK that produce a fiscal surplus. Seven other regions of the UK are all in fiscal deficit and essentially are subsidized by the the most densely populated part of the country.

• 14:25Joe Weisenthal?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next. About the time it takes to grab a coffee, so search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 15:32Speaker 06

  This is Robert Smith from Business History. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're a small business owner. And like every small business owner, you started with a dream to do what you love and watch it grow. What you probably didn't dream about, keeping up with cyber threats. That's where Mastercard can help with access to tools that help identify cyber threats to better protect your business. Building your dream business, priceless. For cybersecurity in a changing world, there's Mastercard.

• 15:59Speaker 06

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• 16:02Tracy Alloway?

  Are there limits to the population density thesis? Because I take the point, and again, if you think of Africa, like it is absolutely huge and we can get into some of the geographical limitations later on and populations are, you know, relatively scattered. But thinking back to the Nigeria example, I mean, Nigeria population like has been one of the denser populated areas on the continent for a while, but it has actually, I think, underperformed relative to a lot of other countries. So what does that say about the importance of population density?

• 16:35Speaker 05

  So you're right, Nigeria is about 250 people per square kilometer, which is significantly higher than the than the African average today. I wouldn't say, though, that it has overall underperformed in the period since 2000, when the whole African economy has picked up. Nigerian agriculture, which is the thing I would expect to show growth first as population grows, because when poor people will will just eat more. I mean, that's the first thing they they do, they consume more, more, more in the way of foodstuffs. Nigerian agriculture since 2000 has been growing close to 6% a year. That's faster than anywhere that I'm aware of in Asia, faster than somewhere like China.

• 17:20Speaker 05

  So things are moving, they're not moving crazy fast because Nigeria is a pretty dysfunctional country at the level of its politics and organizationally. But within it, there are places that are moving fast already. And you already alluded to Lagos, which is the city of 14 million people, which already accounts for a fifth of the Nigerian economy, just this one city. And it's the most densely populated part of a densely populated country. And although when you go there, you think, oh, my God, this is just mayhem.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  But but the fact is, an awful lot is getting done. You know, whether it is in terms of Ali Kudangote's industrial development, whether it's in terms of infrastructure construction, whether it's in terms of the Nollywood film industry or the Nigerian music industry that dominates the continent. It's it's it's chaos, but it's productive chaos.

• 18:28Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I remember 25 years ago, you would read these things and they would say, the importance, the key to economic development is microcredit and small businesses and someone down gets a loan on their phone and then they buy a cow or a tractor, et cetera. Can you talk about the importance of big companies in economic development, the flip side of that? Why, like, how rare is a company like Dangote compared to other potential industrial peers in Africa? And why is the size itself a sort of reason to think that this could have positive flywheel effects?

• 19:11Speaker 05

  Outside of South Africa, where obviously you have a much more mature economy and so higher revenues in big companies, Dangote is pretty unique. But Dangote doesn't stand alone in the sense that you see in different African countries, the growth of significant numbers now of companies that turn over billions of dollars a year. So this is small change in in terms of US multinationals, but it's previously unheard of in Africa. Quite a lot of these companies originate in agriculture in one way or another. They're the they often are the manufacturing end of agriculture, so they process foodstuffs

• 19:53Speaker 05

  to produce processed foods, which is what Africans are now consuming instead of milling their own their own corn or whatever at home. And then they go on and they do other things. So there's a big, big firm, for instance, in Tanzania called Bakreza, comes out of milling, moved into milling in about seven or eight different African countries. But now it's doing everything from owning a football club to owning a TV station to real estate, to running the boats out to Zanzibar, all of this stuff. So that part of the question, the answer is that we are seeing the growth of bigger companies in Africa. So then why do we need bigger companies?

• 20:37Speaker 05

  We need them for the same reason you need big companies in every economy, because only big companies have the cash flows to really be able to train people and move the needle on productivity. All right, so you're right, there's a huge amount of attention is paid to SMEs. It's not necessarily wrong, but when people talk about SMEs, it's an employment consideration. They employ people, they soak up a lot of unemployed people. But if you want to move the needle on productivity, you need big firms.

• 21:06Tracy Alloway?

  So the animal economic paradigm that we're most used to discussing on Odd Lots is monkeys swinging from trees, per Ricardo Hausmann's theory. But there's another one that you mentioned in your book, which is the flying geese paradigm. Would something like that apply to Africa in its current state? Do you see any evidence that industries are sort of trading up as countries actually advance and develop?

• 21:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that the clearest evidence of of the evolution of big firms is in the two most populous countries at the moment in Nigeria and in Ethiopia. And, you know, some countries are going to have to lead first in Africa as they did in Asia. And the the flying geese thing will ultimately prove to have some truth as it did in Asia. It's just that the timeframe tends to be rather longer than the people who come up with these theories imagine, you know. So for instance, Cambodia now has a pretty large garmenting sector employing millions of people. But it did it did take about sixty, seventy years for that to happen.

• 22:18Joe Weisenthal?

  What do we see in terms of what we would call like moving up the manufacturing ladder? Do we see things that we would call like, you know, the story was for years in China, it's like, okay, they make a million T-shirts and that gets them like one Boeing plane or something like that. And then eventually they make more advanced things and they can import more Boeing planes. Do we see that evidence currently of just the increased ability to do reasonably complex reasonably complex assembly?

• 22:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, we do. We don't see it as across fifty five countries in Africa, but we do. I mean, I've, you know, I've talked about Dangote proving that he can do three, you know, cement's not uncomplex, fertilizer quite complex. You've got to do, you've got to work with with with gas. It's not just a straightforward manufacturing process and an oil refinery refinery is unbelievably complex. So and you do see you see signs of similar things in other countries. Again, to go to Ethiopia, two, three weeks ago,

• 23:34Speaker 05

  I was standing in what will be the first float glass plant, making, you know, regular

• 23:43Speaker 05

  modern glass used in in windows and whatever. So countries are moving forward in that respect. I mean, one observation I'd make in Africa is that governments tend to remain so weak that the private sector has to do more heavy lifting than it ever had to do in Asia, where you had developmental states with governments providing tremendous support to the to the private sector. You tend not to get that. In Africa, often the private sector is the most competent, capable player in the game. But again, you know, it's demographics. We have to hope that the depth and quality of African governments will improve. And

• 24:28Speaker 05

  in theory, it should do so with thicker, denser populations, because that means that you've got bigger cities and you can raise more tax and more income is what a lot of African governments need to enable them to do more things.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 25:43Speaker 06

  This is Robert Smith from Business History. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're a small business owner. And like every small business owner, you started with a dream to do what you love and watch it grow. What you probably didn't dream about keeping up with cyber threats. That's where Mastercard can help with access to tools that help identify cyber threats to better protect your business. Building your dream business, priceless. For cybersecurity in a changing world, there's Mastercard.

• 26:10Speaker 06

  Learn more at mastercard.com/smallbusiness.

• 26:13Speaker 07

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• 27:13Tracy Alloway?

  So you mentioned being in Ethiopia a couple of weeks ago, and I'm very curious how much time you're spending on the ground in the region now. And I feel like we should allow you to maybe provide a bit of context here, because a lot of people will know you from How Asia Works, which was this, you know, now it's a seminal book. But when it came out, it was kind of out of consensus. And then suddenly you're turning your attention to Africa. What's going on here? Why the transition?

• 27:39Speaker 05

  Well, that happened a while ago, back in about twenty eighteen. So I mean, the first thing that happened was that the Ethiopian and Rwandan governments invited me to go out and see what they were doing. And I said, it's it's very flattering that you're inviting me, but I don't know anything about Africa. So there's no point. And they said, no, no, no, we want to talk about Asian development policy. So I went and I saw things that I thought were genuinely interesting and impressive. And then subsequent to that, I met with Bill Gates, who was a fan of How Asia Works. And at the end of that meeting, he said, oh, what I really want to know is what you think about Africa, because that's where I'm spending

• 28:19Speaker 05

  all my money. And I decided then that I would do the book that came out this year. So I haven't been everywhere in Africa. I've worked so far in about fifteen countries. I don't go and spend my time in in what you might call failed states, because it's it's not the nature of my work. My work's about economic development and and progress. But I have thoroughly enjoyed what I've seen so far. And yeah, and I'm reasonably positive. I mean, I'm not crazy positive, but I'm more positive than a lot of people are, I think.

• 28:57Tracy Alloway?

  Well, can I just ask you a process question? Because if someone if someone ever, they wouldn't, but if they ever came to me and said, like, I don't think so. We want you to write a book about Africa, which is a very big place that I admittedly know nothing about. I would be incredibly intimidated about starting that research process and just editing, you know, basically the history of economic development in all of Africa down to a consumable publication. How did you decide like what your research process would look like? And how did you decide which things to tackle versus others? Because if, I mean, it's huge. It's a huge amount that you just took on.

• 29:40Speaker 05

  Yes. I mean, the process in the beginning was to decide what to leave out. So you've got fifty five countries. And I whittled that down to fifteen that I thought were important and would would would tell the reader enough about the continent as a whole. And of course, that then makes the work a bit more manageable. But I knew that it was going to be a huge task. And I did it, you know, as my main occupation over a period of five years. It took a long, a long time.

• 30:09Joe Weisenthal?

  One of the debates that's been going on that I see, I mean, part of, you know, like, obviously, like, the Asia stuff is just very hot right now. People, you see the booming, you know, the booming Chinese economy, the booming Korean economy, et cetera. Something that I'm curious to hear your take on is, one of the things people are saying is that China's manufacturing dominance, its absolute efficiency gains, et cetera, are sort of depriving other parts of the world from having climbed the same ladder. That, for example, China, yes, it can make some of the most advanced chips in the world, but there might still be an entire city that's devoted to making Christmas tinsel

• 30:53Joe Weisenthal?

  or something like that. And this is the extremely low margin types of manufacturing that historically might have been the first seeds of a more complex ecosystem in another country. But on the other hand, and some some of this comes through in your book, you could argue that some of the gains that we are seeing and some of the encouraging African success stories are in part thanks to cheap inputs from China. I'm thinking like fertilizer and probably cheap machinery, et cetera, that allows for improving agricultural productivity, which in your view is very key. Why don't you talk to us like your take on the relationship between the incredible gains we've seen in Asia and China specifically,

• 31:38Joe Weisenthal?

  and the implications, therefore, for African prospects right now?

• 31:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I so first of all, I think that there's people tend to tend to perceive China as continuing to export absolutely everything that it's ever made. But if you look at the trade data for China, what you see is that China's actually exporting less and less of the low value added stuff that it that it began with. And quite a lot of that is going to places like Cambodia, which I just mentioned. What China's really exporting at the moment is things like electrical electric vehicles and and other other green energy products, you know, that are that are much more sort of cutting edge and capital intensive in terms of what it did in the past.

• 32:25Speaker 05

  So if Africa's competing against garmenting exports, for instance, it's much more competing against stuff coming out of Myanmar, out of Cambodia, out of Sri Lanka, out of out of India. So I I think that that Africa is capable of doing that. Its problem, its main problem is that it doesn't have much commitment from governments to developing manufacturing sectors outside of, to an extent, Nigeria and Ethiopia, which has always had always had that commitment, Morocco to an extent as well, and then one or two other enclaves in places like Madagascar.

• 33:04Speaker 05

  And Africa needs to build that up. I think that telling Africans that they're they're not going to succeed in in manufacturing is very dangerous and very bad advice. I absolutely think that they can succeed in manufacturing. And in the places that I've seen them manufacturing, they seem to be doing fine. I don't buy into the idea that there's been a a change, or there is an ongoing change now based around robotics and AI. That means that there will be no manufacturing development in Africa. You're right that some cheap inputs from from China have been helpful to development in in Africa. But the thing I would emphasize

• 33:45Speaker 05

  much more than that that's come from China is large amounts of manufacturing investments. So if you look at the FT's micro database of FDI for last year, China put twelve and a half billion dollars into manufacturing investments in Africa. And if you then dig into like, why are they doing that? The the answer is usually because they can get better margins manufacturing in Africa, particularly for African consumption than they can in China. I mean, an awful lot of manufacturing in China today has very, very low margins. So Chinese money is looking, you know, steel is one example. Steel in China at the moment

• 34:31Speaker 05

  sells for about five to six hundred dollars a ton. In Africa, it sells for about a thousand. So unsurprisingly, a number of Chinese firms have relocated steel mills to Africa. There's there's one in Zimbabwe, there's one in South Africa, there's one in Algeria, and there's one that's just been signed in Ethiopia. And it's it's it's all about margins i- i- in in the end. And then, you know, Chinese firms also investing widely in all kinds of other businesses, ceramics, you know, to produce bathroom stuff that's consumed in vast quantities in developing countries, all sorts of things. So I don't buy the idea that there's this

• 35:15Speaker 05

  paradigm change in in in manufacturing. And I think the final point there I would make is that, you know, when you get conversations about robotics and AI and the effect on manufacturing, they tend they tend to never introduce the question of cost. All right. So robots cost a lot of money, and they are also a sunk cost that when you buy them for your factory, you pay for the whole thing upfront. On the other hand, in Africa at the moment, somewhere like Madagascar, you can get labor for sixty dollars a month, right? What it costs in China in the mid nineties, not adjusted for inflation. So as I my feeling is that any manufacturer

• 35:58Speaker 05

  who can make use of labor instead of paying upfront for robots is likely to continue to do so. Yeah, not least again, because people don't talk about the inflexibility of robots. Okay, they they can do a certain amount. When your demand goes up, you can't turn the speed up on on most robots in factories. Okay, they they continue to do the same amount. And you've got to get new robots, but that's not quick. Whereas when you need to hire and fire labor, that is very quick in in developing countries.

• 36:33Tracy Alloway?

  So I have a bunch of questions, specific questions on Africa's manufacturing potential, but just a step back question first. You emphasize the development of manufacturing as like this important step in the growth of an economy, and you do this both in how Asia works and how Africa works. Explain what it is that seems to make manufacturing in some sense special when it comes to economic development? And could you ever have a situation in Africa where, I don't know, maybe a government is like, I don't want to mass produce a bunch of toilet ceramics. I want to leapfrog ahead to a service industry and just start there?

• 37:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. So what makes manufacturing special is that you can take people usually out of the rural economy, out of the farm economy, and bring them into the modern urban economy. And you can do that with relatively low levels of education. They just need to be numerate and literate, and they're in a factory. And then they largely learn on the job. And factories become the kind of vocational training schools for developing economies. So the whole process is affordable to the developing economy. The problem that you have when you want to jump into value added services is that value added services almost always require a higher level of education and training. So who's going to pay for that? The person who's coming

• 37:56Speaker 05

  out of agriculture hasn't got the money to pay for that. And, you know, is the employer, you know, so the government's going to come with the money? I, you know, the government's not going to have the money because definitionally, it's the government of a of of a poor country. You know, and the best example really to look to is always India for where you go with like value added services, because of the Indian Institute of Technology, the the history there, they've always had a supply of highly trained tech graduates who allowed entrepreneurs to build very successful IT businesses. But the I that IT sector in India still only employs

• 38:38Speaker 05

  about six million people. It's just nothing compared with the employment generated by manufacturing, you know. And and then you look at the overall impact on growth, India, which has never really had a serious manufacturing strategy, although Modi kind of talks it up at the moment, but he's never really had one. If you look back to the period since nineteen ninety one, when India's reforms began, India's grown at four point two percent a year average. Okay, if you look at China, which really maxed out support for manufacturing, that's an a that's a an economy that grew for thirty years at ten percent a year. That, to me,

• 39:21Speaker 05

  is the difference. And so I often say to to, you know, people in countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia, well, you know, what do you want to be? Do you want to be India? Or do you want to be something more like China?

• 39:35Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm curious, like, you mentioned that one of the issues is that the sort of like the developmentalist mindset, as you understand it, or the optimal developmentalist mindset is unevenly distributed throughout Africa. So there are leaders who might want to talk to you about like, well, what is a realistic way in which we can develop along the East Asian path and then others not? When you look at the uneven distribution of this, is this just about like, some people have different opinions? Or is this about like, there is something endemic to the politics in certain countries, such that whoever is going to be the person that winds up in the seat, winds up as president and so forth, is maybe going

• 40:20Joe Weisenthal?

  to be more likely to fundamentally say, owe their political allegiance to, say, medium sized farms or something like that, such that the developmentalist approach is going to be off the table because that is not the politics out from which they come?

• 40:38Speaker 05

  Well, I have never managed to to to get data to sort of nail this down very well. But my personal view is that endemic to the politi- the politics of Africa is that politics in Africa are particularly aristocratic. So you particularly have leaders and the people around them who are aristocrats with all the kind of prejudices that go with that. They don't like small farmers, they like big farms. They're not terribly interested in in in manufacturing. It's kind of, you know, sit in my office and wait for people to come to me. That has been the that's been, to me, the reality and the and the tradition. But I think that what is also very important is that demonstration, what economists call

• 41:23Speaker 05

  demonstration effects, counts for a lot. And that as countries see places like Lagos or economies like Ethiopia moving fast, right? Ethiopia's not grown less than five percent for twenty five years now.

• 41:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Wow.

• 41:42Speaker 05

  Okay, it was the poorest country in the world. That's why why it's taking a long time to get on the radar. You know, when you're a hundred bucks GDP per capita to start, you know, the maths are are pretty ugly for for a long period. But now, it's still growing ten percent a year, and it's at a couple of thousand dollars. So that makes some difference. But, you know, so the point is that when people see what's going on in these countries, as was the case in East Asia, when people first saw what was going on in Japan, and subsequently saw what was going on in Korea and Taiwan, it makes a difference. You know, it becomes a self reinforcing positive spiral.

• 42:24Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, since you brought up Ethiopia, we know, well, your book came out earlier this year, before, I think it was in twenty twenty, Ethiopia, there was a civil war that broke out in Ethiopia. So I'm curious how you think of the relationship between economic development, the Ethiopian economic success story versus political stability? Because I imagine, you know, had you maybe written this book in twenty nineteen or something like that, you'd you already hold out Ethiopia as a success story in the current version, but maybe it would have been even more of a success story before the civil war.

• 43:03Speaker 05

  To be honest, I mean, the remarkable thing is that the policy tracks that were laid in Ethiopia prior to the civil war, combined with some adjustments and more opening to the private sector that's come under RB, the current PM, have just meant that the, I mean, the economy kept growing five, six percent through the civil war. So, you know, that is, that's what happens when you build institutional capability and you get the right policies in place. But it's a fact of life in Africa, and again, it goes back to demographics, that ethnic cleavage is present in pretty much every society on the continent, right?

• 43:44Speaker 05

  Because historically, population was so sparse in Africa, that different tribal, for want of a better term, groups didn't, it seems, from what historians can make out, come into conflict very much. Because whenever conflict was brewing, one group or the other would just take off, and there was always more land available. There was always massive amounts of land for people. And so all these thousands of different groups with 3,000 different languages continued to survive. But of course, today, with population up to 1.5 billion, going to 2.5 billion in 2050, these ethnic groups now are pushing up against each other

• 44:28Speaker 05

  in a manner that they never have before. And they have to find ways of, of getting past these, these kind of visceral ethnic reactions that they sometimes have.

• 44:42Tracy Alloway?

  You mentioned something there that reminded me of what I wanted to ask you about export manufacturing in particular, which is, again, you think of Africa, and as you said, it's just this huge amount of land, including like some very, very remote tracts of land and nations, landlocked nations in the middle of the continent where it takes days and days and days to actually travel anywhere else. How much of a limitation is that on manufacturing for export purposes in particular? Especially since in a lot of these countries, we're talking about places that don't have a lot of infrastructure. And so I would imagine that some of your labor competitive edge starts to wear off once you start factoring in the need to, you know,

• 45:25Tracy Alloway?

  put manufactured goods on a train for three weeks or something like that.

• 45:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, so just to start by contextualizing the bigness of Africa. You can fit China, India, Europe, and the United States inside Africa. That's how big it is. It's, it's crazy big. So, and then your question, I think, makes a lot of sense, so long as what we are thinking about is Africa exporting to other parts of the world. But my response to that would be that I think that a lot of export growth in Africa, most export growth in Africa, is going to come from exporting to other states within the African continent. And the data are beginning to show that. The, the rate of growth of exports within the continent

• 46:15Speaker 05

  is already growing faster than, than to, to other parts of the world. Doesn't mean that Africa won't export to other parts of, of the world. It just kind of depends where you are on this huge continent. If you're up in North Africa, or if you're in Morocco, and you're only 14 kilometers away from, from Europe, it makes sense to be exporting, you know, which is why two of the biggest French car companies are making their cars there now. And aerospace and other manufacturers that need to be close to Europe at one low cost have gone there.

• 46:53Joe Weisenthal?

  To Morocco?

• 46:54Speaker 05

  To Morocco, yeah, yeah. Up in, there's a development called Tangier Med, Tangier, up there, just the, basically near the closest bit to Europe. And they've opened industrial parks, not huge, but there's, you know, 100,000 plus people working in the industrial parks there doing cars and aerospace stuff and, and other things.

• 47:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Can you talk a little bit more about, I think it was in your book that I saw, or maybe it was something, it was probably in your book, maybe it was something that I saw after reading it. But like this phenomena that what makes Africa, or what had made Africa unusual, is that you didn't have this great landless peasant movement, that there wasn't, you know, because in part of the stories of Asia, it's like land reform, right? You have like some big transfer from wealthy landholders to the public. And that in Africa, that had never really been the issue. And that makes it a fundamentally different story. Can you talk a little bit more about just this sort of weird reverberations

• 48:00Joe Weisenthal?

  that come from a underlying condition where land is just not a particularly scarce, a particularly scarce resource?

• 48:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's very un, very un-Asian. So after the Second World War in, in East Asia, land was the most explosive issue because there just wasn't enough of it. And that's why the Chinese Communist Party won control of the country largely by redistributing land and giving land to people who agreed to fight for the People's Liberation Army. And then why the United States reacted by supporting land reform programs in Japan and in Korea and in Taiwan. And even in the seventies, when the US was losing in, in Vietnam, sent people in to start doing land reform just before the, just before the fall of Saigon.

• 48:51Speaker 05

  But it was, it was too late. So that is demographics. And then the demographics of, of Africa, as we've been saying, is very sparse population. So everybody's got land. The only place in, that I'm aware of in, in Africa, in 55 countries that ever had any kind of land reform was, oh, well, there was Kenya. I suppose there was the, in, in the highlands in Kenya, there was. But I was thinking of Zanzibar, which was a very particular case because you had these kind of, this sort of feudal Amani elite who owned all the land when, when it became independent. But no, that's been the case. And there are still large parts of, of, of countries that have super abundant land.

• 49:36Speaker 05

  I mean, somewhere like Tanzania, there's still loads of land left. But because of population growth, there are other parts of the African continent where there is now some rising land pressure. So around the Great Lakes, in the Ethiopian highlands, and some bits of, of West Africa as well. But it, yes, as you say, it's not been an issue scarcity of land in, in Africa. The problem in Africa was scarcity of people.

• 50:05Tracy Alloway?

  Well, but there is still scarcity of assets that make the land viable as well, right? And the only reason I know that is because I read the chapter on Botswana, where you talk about how, you know, there's loads of land, there's loads of cattle, but all the elites own the boreholes that produce the water for the cattle. And so you still end up with a very unequal economic society.

• 50:29Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly. You can still get that. And there's a tendency all over Africa today as demand for, for food stocks increases, as Africa has now had for 25 years, the fastest rate of, the whole continent has had the fastest rate of agricultural growth in the world, just over 4%. There is the tendency for urban, urban wealthy people, you know, what I refer to as African kulaks in the book, to buy up chunks of land or lease chunks of land and displace peasant farmers. So for the first time now in Africa, you're beginning to see a kind of land, landless peasantry, something that has never existed before.

• 51:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, do you, do you know what the, the etymological root of the word kulak is?

• 51:19Tracy Alloway?

  No.

• 51:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Do you know, Joe?

• 51:22Speaker 05

  I don't know, no.

• 51:23Joe Weisenthal?

  It's good.

• 51:24Tracy Alloway?

  No, you've stumped us.

• 51:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it means fist, as in they were perceived to be tight-fisted. And so that they were like, had, yeah, that's like where that word came from. That's like the one thing I, I know about them. All right, last question for me, you know, like I've never been, I do want to travel to Africa, but it's a whole continent. I've never been particularly interested in the past because I'm not interested like in going, you know, seeing wild animals or something like that. I want to visit a city. I like to see how people live and how urban economies are happening, et cetera. Where would you recommend I buy a ticket to?

• 52:02Speaker 05

  I think you've got to see Lagos.

• 52:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 52:04Speaker 05

  It's just, it's just insane. I mean, just the, the, the people, the chaos, you know, and, yeah, you just.

• 52:15Joe Weisenthal?

  I got my son a jersey from, when we were in Madrid. I got my son a jersey for the team Atlético Madrid. And on the jersey, they're sponsored by the Rwanda Tourism Board. And so on his jersey that he wears, it says, "Visit Rwanda." So would, would you recommend also Kigali trip?

• 52:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, that then will blow your mind because it's about the cleanest city in the world. You know, Kagami sends people out on Saturday morning picking up litter. There isn't much litter to pick up. But I mean, you know, polishing, polishing the city.

• 52:50Joe Weisenthal?

  We haven't really talked about Rwanda much, but as we famously know, its president has talked about this country could be the Singapore of Africa. And obviously, when you talk about.

• 53:04Tracy Alloway?

  He himself is very Lee Kwan Yu-coded, right?

• 53:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, right. And so, right, so when you mentioned the cleanliness aspect, that's interesting. Where is Rwanda on that trajectory? And could you see a plausibility where it's a tiny landlocked country, unlike Singapore that has ports and stuff like that? But could it be the sort of like financial capital of Africa where that's the first stop for money, which then is invested elsewhere?

• 53:34Speaker 05

  I I don't know that it will be, I mean, I don't think there'll be a single financial center for Africa. I think that's unlikely, but I think that Kigali can be one of them. You know, they've done a very good job bringing in tech people. They've done a very good job making it a conference center. They've done a very good job bringing in various multilateral organizations to be headquartered there. And of course, you know, what no one talks about is the fact that Kagame has expanded his country by essentially manipulating Eastern

• 54:13Speaker 05

  DRC, separating it from the rest of the DRC and running it as a sort of Rwandan colony, which is handy because it's got, you know, some pretty decent mineral reserves, which all get run through Rwanda. I mean, the world has got a little bit more tough in diplomatic terms on Kagame in the last sort of two, three years, but not, not very tough. And yeah, he, he, he, he plays an extraordinary, but I think utterly ruthless.

• 54:52Tracy Alloway?

  Well, actually, this just reminded me, there's, there's a through line between how Asia works and how Africa works. There's a bunch of them, but the other one we haven't talked about yet is the importance of finance and I guess directed lending to developmental projects. And it seems like Rwanda in particular, setting itself up as the sort of Singaporean model. I think they chose not to have capital controls at all. But talk to us a little bit about how finance plays out in all of this. And also, when you think about finance in developing economies, you might often think about corruption and the difference between a legitimate developmental loan to an upcoming company versus, you know, a crony of the president

• 55:37Tracy Alloway?

  or something can sometimes be very narrow. But what's the importance of finance here? And how are you thinking about it?

• 55:44Speaker 05

  Okay. Well, I mean, first on Rwanda, you're, you're right. So Rwanda wants to be Singapore. So they are, they are looking to have no capital controls so that money can freely come in and out because they want to get all money related to Eastern DRC, money from other wealthy people who kind of feel secure about keeping it in Kigali. So they're not in a developmental game whereby they want to control their domestic finances for development. But that is what the tradition from East Asia is when you have a developmental state. One of the key things that you do is that you have capital controls so that your domestic savings are locked down and your population can't decide to move its money

• 56:28Speaker 05

  to New York to get a better rate of return. The money stays at home. And then you have a banking system, which, and there are a number of ways, there are a number of ways in which it's successfully been done, but essentially you have a banking system which takes a lot of direction from government and also gets a bit of subsidy, fiscal subsidy as well to support it for losses that may be incurred in supporting industrial policy. So, you know, inevitably, money is very important. And I wouldn't say that things have changed much in terms of what you want to do if you are more of a developmental state. So, I mean, I've been very intrigued by the reporting of Ethiopia over the last couple of years, which has been, I don't know on Bloomberg, but widely reported to have got rid of capital

• 57:13Speaker 05

  controls, which is completely untrue. They've basically, they've basically moved to where China is, all right, which as we all know, has, has capital controls. And so, you know, but they're opening, they're open on the, on the trade account so that investors in Ethiopia now know that, that the foreign exchange, they can get it in and they can remit it to their ultimate owners. However, across Africa, if we look across 55 countries, what we see is that most countries got rid of capital controls and they did so on the advice of the IMF and the World Bank. That means that then you get private banks that are interested to come in and invest. And they go, oh, look, all these foreign banks

• 57:57Speaker 05

  have come and invested. That isn't that good. But what the private banks do that come and invest is basically just push out consumer credit. Okay. And it's not conducive to development of domestic industrial capacity, just to have your banks lending people money to buy imported motorcycles.

• 58:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Joe Studwell, this fascinating, we could go on for a very long time. It's a shame that it took us so long for us to get you on the podcast, but very fascinating new book, very fascinating new work. And I think something that maybe, you know, I feel as though so many of the stories we hear these days are just over and over again. China does this, AI does this, China, Trump did this. I find it refreshing to hear this topic that I kind of feels unzeitgeisty, but also very interesting and important. So I really appreciate you taking your time.

• 58:52Speaker 05

  Thank you. See you guys.

• 59:05Joe Weisenthal?

  I thought that was super interesting. I thought it was like really, you know, look, you talk about like, it's just such a cliche. You have to mention Africa as a place to just extraordinarily diverse and like, there's no common geography or common anything. The point about like land abundance and labor sparsity as this sort of like defining aspect. And then the way I hadn't really like put it together, which is like, if you can have the unfortunate, you know, tribes that are like totally separate, and then suddenly you draw a big square around them, or you draw a big shape around them, and they have

• 59:44Joe Weisenthal?

  like no internal cohesiveness, you can understand how that creates this sort of like permanent, permanent political problem.

• 59:53Tracy Alloway?

  Right. Well, the thing I find really interesting about Joe, the other Joe's argument is the population density aspect of it. Cause that, that feels to me like something which is changing. You can see it in the numbers that it's starting to change. And if you do get more dense cities, I guess just more customers for potential goods produced within Africa, then that takes care of a lot of the manufacturing challenges that you could foresee. When you think about manufacturing, you think normally like, okay, we're gonna produce stuff cheaply and we're gonna export it and then we're gonna do the flying geese thing. And then we're gonna do the monkeys swinging from the trees thing. And that's

• 1:00:34Tracy Alloway?

  how we become a developed economy. But then, as you were pointing out, you know, development doesn't happen in a vacuum. You have huge competition from places like China. You also have a broad landscape globally of just people becoming more protective with their own trade, right? So, so that would be a massive challenge for a place like Africa. Again, not a monolith, but we're talking about it as such. But if the population density means that the domestic market actually increases, then, then that's a huge market. It could be a huge market.

• 1:01:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Totally. By the way, did you see this story, it didn't come up, that Morocco named a highway after President Trump?

• 1:01:18Tracy Alloway?

  No, I didn't.

• 1:01:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay. So there's a story that, it's like, it's funny. And they, for whatever the reason, there's a Trump highway. And then I saw that several, I saw several weeks later after that news, there that there is an attempt to build a coastal East African natural gas pipeline that would go up through Morocco into Europe. And this is the key bit, that they're hoping to get financing from the American Export Import Bank to build that. And suddenly I was like, oh, maybe I do get why you would want to name your, your highway after President Trump. But like, anyway, I

• 1:01:55Tracy Alloway?

  Can I say one thing about Moroccan highways?

• 1:01:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Tracy Alloway?

  I know you're a fan of Buc-E's.

• 1:01:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:59Tracy Alloway?

  Moroccan gas stations are amazing.

• 1:02:01Joe Weisenthal?

  I gotta go.

• 1:02:02Tracy Alloway?

  You would love them. And they actually have really, really good food and are extremely dependable and for the most part clean, but the food is the thing to go for.

• 1:02:10Joe Weisenthal?

  I really want to go. So, okay, we're gonna do live Odd Lots in, at the Dengote, or, you know, we'll, we'll take a tour of the Dengote refinery.

• 1:02:20Tracy Alloway?

  I'll go to Lagos with you. I haven't been. We should go.

• 1:02:24Joe Weisenthal?

  And, great, we'll make that happen.

• 1:02:26Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Shall we leave it there?

• 1:02:27Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 1:02:27Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 1:02:33Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Wazenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest, Joe Studwell. He's at Joe Studwell. Follow our producers, Kermit Rodriguez at Kermit Armin, Dashil Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano.

• 1:02:48Tracy Alloway?

  And for more Odd Lots content, you should check out our daily newsletter. You can find that at Bloomberg.com/oddlots.

• 1:02:54Joe Weisenthal?

  And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 1:03:01Tracy Alloway?

  And if you liked this episode, if you want us to go on a trip to Lagos, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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