He is only 31, the youngest Member of the Order of the Niger (MON) awardee and the brain behind one of the biggest rice mills in Nigeria worth N2.5 billion. He is Sadiq Abubakar Falau. He runs FaLGates Foods, a rice production and milling venture in Kaduna State, which grows, processes, packs, and sells parboiled rice. But how did a 31-year-old manage to mobilise the capital to build a N2.5 billion rice mill in Kaduna, with a processing capacity of about 300 metric tons per day, that is over 100,000 metric tons per annum?
While studying for a master’s degree in innovation management and entrepreneurship in China, Falau was wowed by the investment that the Asian giant made in agriculture. He toured their rice fields and learnt all he could about rice production. Then he returned to Nigeria and attempted to replicate the feat that he saw in China.
He was inexperienced, didn’t have much capital to hire expertise in that field, but he wanted to achieve what he saw in China. He got his mother to become his first investor and she did with an appreciable sum, in addition to the money he made from trading goods as a student in China.
With that, he bought an integrated rice processing mill in early 2017. This enabled him to process rice, using that one plant. He had just eight employees. He learnt how to run a factory without experience, dealt with losses and at some point, even lived in the factory. His inexperience however almost led the company to fold two years later. Without any working capital to acquire a place of his own, he ended up with fixed assets on a rented premise that had a short-term lease. After a short while, the owner wanted his place back and Falau had to disassemble his plant and sell it bit by bit. After he disposed of its plant, he outsourced production and continued selling his rice brand, FaLGates. It cost him more to remain in business and reduced his profit but he trudged on. Then COVID-19 pandemic happened.
The pandemic brought along with it many lessons and challenges for entrepreneurs, but Falau saw the lessons in it and reaffirmed his insistence to remain in the business having seen that the food business is it. After all, pandemic or not, people will have to eat and most Nigerians like to consume rice. Another thing that kept him going during his trying period was his customer base, wholesalers in Kaduna and other parts of the country.
He took a business risk, selling on credit to wholesalers. Despite the fact that some took advantage of his selling on credit, the majority however, didn’t let him down and his business risk soon paid off. He soon began making profit and at a point made profit in excess of half a million dollars. Before long, he became an authority in the rice milling business and began to consult for investors and businesses that wanted to open rice mills.
One of the investors ended up becoming his business partner, and together, they built the single largest rice milling plant in Kaduna State valued at $5 million. The fund came through equity and debt financing. FaLGates currently processes up to 50,000 metric tonnes of rice per year, with a turnover of $3.4 million per annum in revenue.
Having made a success of his rice milling business, Falau has his sights set on trading in maize and is looking into beef farming as well, to use the rice bran from his mill as feed. The company’s goal is to grow organically by boosting acreage under cultivation as well as expanding into the southeast region of Nigeria, which consumes more rice than the rest of the country. For all of his achievements, at a relatively young age, he was among the 442 recipients of national awards recently by President Muhammadu Buhari.
Ivory Ukonu is a versatile journalist with many years of experience, with entertainment and society reporting as her area of core competence.
