Nigerian millionaires will climb by 47 per cent in the next four years, this is according to a report by New World Wealth.

The number of Nigerians with investable assets of at least 1 million US dollars will jump 23 thousand by 2017.

The report that was released earlier this week also said that the growth in high net worth individuals is linked to the country’s GDP, the local equity market and the local real estate amongst other factors.

“We look at a number of factors, we look at trends in the market, the historical growth factors, we look at GDP growth going forward, the forecast on that and we try make estimates on how we think the property market and the real estate market is going to perform,” Andrew Amoils, Analyst at New World Wealth told CNBC Africa.


The report also suggested that the number of Nigerians with investable assets of at least 1 million US dollars will jump 23 thousand by 2017. Amoils believes that the key is historical trend as a country that has grown quite strongly will continue to do assuming it starts from a relatively low base as Nigeria does.

Nigerian Millionaires On The Rise

Nigerian millionaires set to grow
The number of millionaires in Nigeria will climb 47% in the next four years. That's according to analysts at New World Wealth.

“We look at wealth according to the number of people that have made one million dollars from a sector so it doesn’t necessarily correlate to the growth of that sector. For instance, there’s a lot of countries like Vietnam which hasn’t had strong index real estate growth in the last six years, but the number of people who have made money from the real estate has been astronomical,” he explained.

Nigeria’s economy has expanded on average of 8.2 per cent annually since 1999 and has the third highest number of millionaires on the continent after South Africa and Egypt.

The report also found that about 26 per cent of Nigeria’s 82 billion dollars wealth was offshore last year, with the bulk of the private banking funds deposited in the UK, Switzerland and the Channel Islands.

“That trend is common globally, it is a relatively high percentage for an African country obviously, there’s a lot of Nigerian people that have money in the UK and Switzerland, and property in those countries,” he said.

Amoils believes that the under developed private banking in Nigeria makes most high net worth individuals go offshore for investment banking with big international banks.


http://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/western-africa/2014/03/07/nigerian-millionaires-on-the-rise/