Nigeria buys from China. Two states clear it.

Everything written about Nigeria’s trade with China stops at the port. Container volumes, exchange rates, tariff changes, the naira cost of a forty-foot box. All of it ends the moment the ship ties up at Apapa or Onne. But a container sitting on a quay is not an import. Somebody has to file the paperwork, pay the duty, argue with an examination officer and move the goods inland. That is a business, and there are a countable number of them.

So we counted. Ranked holds 3,223 Nigerian businesses across the whole chain that begins when a container is discharged: freight forwarders, customs clearing agents, international shipping agents, logistics companies, courier services, airport cargo handlers, bonded warehouses and cold chain operators. Here is what that map actually looks like.

Fifty-eight per cent of the paperwork lives in two states

Freight forwarding is the load-bearing trade in the chain. It is the licensed, bonded, relationship-heavy work of getting goods through Customs, and it is the step an importer cannot do themselves. Nigeria has 493 of these firms in our data.

They are not spread across the country.

• Lagos State: 194 firms — 39.4% of the national total.
• FCT: 91 firms — 18.5%.
• Anambra is third with 24. Then Ogun 23, Delta 22, Akwa Ibom 18, Enugu 13, Abia 12.

Two states hold 57.9% of the country’s clearing capacity. The third-placed state has one firm for every eight in Lagos.

Look closer and the concentration is tighter still. The ten cities with the most freight forwarders are, in order: Lagos (29), Abuja (24), Gwarinpa (18), Ajah (18), Surulere (14), Lugbe (14), Festac (14), Gbagada (14), Apapa (13) and Ijebu-Ode (12). Eight of those ten are neighbourhoods of Lagos or Abuja. Half of every freight forwarder in Nigeria sits in a city that has at least ten of them.

What that means if you are not in Lagos

We cover 183 Nigerian cities. Only 88 of them have a single freight forwarder listed, and 18 of those have exactly one. If you are importing into Maiduguri, Yola or Sokoto, your clearing agent is almost certainly not local. They are in Lagos, and you are managing a relationship at a distance with somebody handling your money and your goods in a city you cannot get to this week.

That is not a scandal — it is what happens when most of a country’s sea freight enters through one port complex. But it is a real cost that never appears in the landed-cost spreadsheet, and it explains something importers say constantly and rarely see written down: the hardest part of buying from China is not China.

The retail-facing end of the trade is far more evenly spread. International shipping agents — the shopfronts that consolidate small parcels and sell you a kilo rate — run Lagos 72, FCT 33, Anambra 22, Delta 21, Ogun 21, Imo 17. That is a normal distribution across commercial Nigeria. Onitsha, which is not a port city, supports a full complement of them because it is where the goods are sold.

So the shape of the trade is this: the selling is everywhere, the last mile is everywhere, and the one irreplaceable licensed step in the middle is in two states.

Six in ten have no website at all

Of those 3,223 businesses, 1,279 have a website — 39.7%. The other 60% are reachable by phone and nothing else; 2,816 have a phone number on record.

For most categories on Ranked that is an inconvenience. For this one it is a risk, because clearing agents are paid in advance, in cash, in amounts that routinely run into millions of naira, by customers who have never met them. Freight forwarding advance-fee fraud is common enough in Nigeria that most regular importers have a story.

If you are choosing one, the checks that matter are boring and they work:

• Ask for the Customs licence number and check it. A licensed agent has one and will give it to you without hesitating. The Nigeria Customs Service is the authority on whether it is real, not the agent’s letterhead.
• Confirm the company exists at CAC. A registration number is checkable on the public register in a couple of minutes, and the name on it should be the name on the account you are asked to pay into.
• Never pay duty to a personal account. Duty is paid to the Federal Government through a designated bank. An agent asking you to send duty money to an individual is not doing your paperwork.
• Ask who else they clear for, then ring one of them. A busy agent has customers who will vouch. Somebody who cannot name one is telling you something.

We wrote a fuller version of these checks in how to check a Nigerian business is real before you pay, and the same logic applies with more force here, because the sums are larger and the goods are already in the country.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure above is from Ranked’s own directory as it stood on 13 September 2026, counting businesses in the eleven categories that make up the post-arrival chain. They are counts of listed businesses, which is not the same as counts of licensed operators: an agent working without a web presence or a Google listing is invisible to us, and the real number of small clearing outfits in Lagos is certainly higher than 194. The concentration ratio is the robust part of this — that undercount applies everywhere, so the balance between states holds even if every absolute number is low.

For the trade figures themselves — what Nigeria buys from China, in what volume, quarter by quarter — the National Bureau of Statistics foreign trade report is the source, and it is the one worth reading rather than the secondary coverage of it.

The businesses

If you are looking for someone, these are the rankings that matter for this trade. Every business on them is scored on the same six published dimensions, and no business can pay to move up.

• Freight forwarders in Lagos and in Apapa, next to the port itself
• Freight forwarders in Abuja and in Onitsha
• International shipping in Lagos and in Onitsha
• Logistics companies in Lagos and courier services in Lagos for the last mile