Actis, a leading private equity investor focused on emerging markets, on Wednesday officially announced the opening of the $100 million (₦15 billion) Ikeja City Mall in Alausa, creating hundreds of job opportunities.
Ikeja City Mall was officially opened on Wednesday
Actis, alongside project partners Paragon Holdings, and RMB Investments and Advisory, built a world class retail and leisure development centre comprising 27,000 square metres of gross built area and 23,000 square meters of lettable area.
The mall accommodates 94 shops including Shoprite’s latest generation store. The design of the mall incorporates informal meeting places, a food hall and a five-screen Silverbird cinema. Bounded by access roads on three sides, the five hectare site is ideally positioned for convenient parking and shopping.
The first day of trading was attended by Babatunde Raji Fashola, governor of Lagos State and his deputy, Adejoke Orelope-Adefulire.
Ngozi Edozien, chief executive at Actis, West Africa, said the Ikeja Mall builds on the success of Actis’s pioneering Palms Mall in Lekki.
“Ikeja City Mall seals Actis’s reputation as the West African investor of choice. Our local team in Lagos has unrivalled access to investment opportunities in real estate, financial services, industrials and consumer businesses, and a network that reaches across the region,”
Ms Edozien said, adding that the company is grateful to the Lagos State government for showing great leadership and vision in its support for the project.
Mr Fashola, who officially declared the mall opened, delivered a keynote address. He said, “This mall restores Ikeja back to its rightful place as the retail hub of Lagos. Actis has shown tremendous leadership and delivered this mall on plan, on time and on budget - following in the footsteps of their other successful real estate projects in West Africa. This development provides an inspiring vision of what can be achieved through collaboration - between the development partners, regulators, government officials and tenants.”
Leisure revolution
Actis believes that Ikeja City Mall heralds the next step in West Africa’s retail and leisure revolution. It said there are 3.9 million potential customers living and working within an 8km radius of the site and 900 permanent jobs have been created. Actis played the lead role in the conception and realisation of the Ikeja City Mall project and is the majority (60 percent) shareholder in Gruppo, the company established to own and manage the mall, while Paragon Holdings and RMBIA each hold 20 percent.
Actis Real Estate Director, Michael Chu’di Ejekam, said the company is proud to unveil Ikeja City Mall, adding that “this is a project that demonstrates Actis’s proven track record of delivering quality real estate for Nigeria.”
“We believe that Actis’s real estate developments can have a profoundly positive impact in sub-Saharan Africa. Ikeja City Mall opens up a space for Nigerians to work and relax. We believe that Nigeria and Ghana alone have the potential for at least 20 more similar scale malls,” Mr Chu’di Ejekam said.
He said the collaborative effort of the Lagos State government which made the mall a success “is actually a testament of how things can be done properly when you have private investors working with the government. Many government officials have watched and witnessed this development on the way. They’ve congratulated us and quite impressed by the speed. This project has a wider effect; it has shown people that a promise can be fulfilled in set time.”
He added that “the project has raised the bar of performance for everybody, both in private and government.”
Actis invests exclusively in the emerging markets with a growing portfolio of investments in Asia, Africa and Latin America; it currently has $4.6bn funds under management. Actis has close to $1.5 billion invested in 18 African countries and 32 investment professionals working in Africa, with offices in Cairo, Johannesburg, Lagos and Nairobi. In March 2011, Actis was named African Private Equity Fund of the Year by PEI Magazine for the fourth year in a row.
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