Where Nigeria actually does business

The short version

Nigerian commerce is far less Lagos-shaped than the conversation about it. Lagos is the largest single market by a wide margin and still accounts for well under a tenth of the businesses we hold.

Lagos leads the city table. The middle is the interesting part.

Lagos has roughly twice Abuja's count and three times Port Harcourt's. But after the top two the curve flattens hard: seven cities sit between four and six thousand listings, close enough that ordering them is almost noise. Benin City, Kaduna, Jos, Warri, Owerri, Enugu and Akure are, as commercial centres, roughly the same size as each other.

That flat middle is the part that gets ignored. A business decision made only for Lagos and Abuja is a decision made for under thirteen per cent of the country's listed businesses.

The largest category in Nigeria is hospitals

Hospitals outnumber restaurants by nearly two to one. Private schools outnumber supermarkets. Pharmacies come close to banks.

Read the top four together and the pattern is hard to miss: hospitals, churches, hotels, private schools. Three of those four are things a state is conventionally expected to provide or heavily shape, and in Nigeria they are overwhelmingly provided privately, at scale, as businesses with signboards and phone numbers. The directory measures what people have had to buy for themselves, rather than consumer appetite.

The long tail is most of the country

The twelve cities above account for roughly 84,000 of the 259,317 listings we hold. The other two thirds are spread across 173 more cities, none of them large enough to appear on a chart like the one above, all of them places where somebody is looking for a dentist this afternoon.

The same is true of categories. Twelve categories appear in the chart; we classify against 1,249. The visible dozen are the ones with enough volume to be obvious. The other 1,237 are where the specific searches happen: a search for the one place in your town that repairs a particular kind of machine, rather than a generic "restaurant" search.

This is the practical argument for a directory over a search engine in this market. The head of the distribution is well served by everybody. The tail is served by nobody, and the tail is where most of the country actually shops.

What the shape suggests about the next few years

Two things follow from a table this flat. The first is that "Nigerian market entry" strategies built only for Lagos and Abuja are addressing a minority of the businesses that exist, and are competing for them against everyone else doing the same.

The second is that the cities in the flat middle are close enough in size that small differences in infrastructure, connectivity and local policy could reorder them quickly. Benin City, Kaduna, Jos, Warri, Owerri, Enugu and Akure are separated by a few hundred listings each. The figures do not form a stable ranking. They show a group of cities that have not yet been differentiated.

What this changes if you are choosing

• Category density says nothing about quality. Nine thousand churches and eleven thousand hospitals mean you have choice. The choice can still be difficult. In the categories that matter most for your health and your children, the volume is exactly why a checklist beats a search.
• Outside Lagos and Abuja, expect thinner evidence. The flat middle of the city table is also where review coverage drops sharply, so the same search returns less to go on.