Nigerian Bottling Company (NBC) has commissioned three new production lines in Oyo and Kano states, the first visible output from the $1 billion, five-year investment pledge Coca-Cola made to Nigeria in September 2024. Two lines went live at the Asejire plant in Oyo State. A third came online at Challawa in Kano, a facility NBC has run since 1982. NBC says more capacity additions are planned across its network through 2026, framing this week’s ceremony as phase one of a longer build-out.
Senator John Owan Enoh, Minister of State for Industry, attended the commissioning, underscoring how central the pledge has become to Abuja’s investment narrative. Coca-Cola announced the $1 billion figure after President Bola Tinubu met company leadership in Abuja, including Coca-Cola HBC chief executive Zoran Bogdanovic. NBC operates as the Nigerian subsidiary of Coca-Cola HBC AG, the London-listed anchor bottler serving 29 countries. The new lines build on $1.5 billion NBC says it has already invested in Nigerian operations over the past decade.
The economic case behind the ribbon-cutting is substantial. A 2024 Steward Redqueen socio-economic impact study found the Coca-Cola System generated $1 billion in value-added activity in Nigeria and supported more than 160,000 livelihoods, a multiplier of 53 additional jobs for every direct System job. The same study found the System sourced $601 million in goods and services from Nigerian suppliers in 2024 alone, a figure that speaks to local procurement depth rather than headline capex.
NBC managing director Goran Sladic tied the expansion to the company’s 75th year in Nigeria, framing continued investment as conditional on policy stability rather than a blank check. That framing lands differently against the rest of Nigeria’s beverage sector right now. Diageo spent the past two years exiting its Guinness Nigeria stake to Tolaram, a retreat that Guinness Nigeria’s own Q1 2026 numbers suggest is paying off for the new owner, even as it marked a very different bet on the market than Coca-Cola’s is making today.
Enoh’s presence at the ceremony also can’t be read in isolation from the fiscal pressure he’s currently managing. As Drinkabl reported in March, the World Bank has pushed Abuja to raise excise duties on alcohol, tobacco, and sugary drinks as a condition of a $750 million reform loan, even as the minister has publicly called for excise measures that “remain balanced and predictable.” NBC’s next capacity phase in 2026 will be a live test of whether that balance holds through the currency and excise pressures that have already reshaped ownership across the rest of the industry.
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