NIGERIA – Nigeria has been described as the future of the beverage market in Africa and the world. 

Georgios Diakakis, the Regional Commercial Manager at Sidel, a global provider of liquid packaging solutions, disclosed this in an email exchange with The Guardian.

Diakakis said Nigeria, being the second biggest producer of beer in Africa, has the highest anticipated growth rate. “In 2013, the country produced over 2,048 million litres, or the equivalent of 16.4 percent of total African production. Demand on the beer is expected to keep growing with a forecast compound annual growth rate of seven percent over the period of 2013 to 2018,” he said.

According to him, “With this growth in mind, we can only expect that producers will start looking for ways to differentiate themselves through using unique innovations. Beer in PET offers just that.

While until now PET only represents a fraction of the total packaging market in Beer, we are aware that producers and consumers are looking for light and sustainable packages at a lower cost. 

We firmly believe that PET packages are the best choice because of its many benefits such as light weight, design flexibility and strength, and we expect to see this trend in Beer within the next few years.”

Diakakis said Nigeria, in recent years, has proved to be a fast-growing market in the beverage industry. He argued that, with Nigeria’s “quickly industrialising urban centers and booming population growth,” the amount of disposable income held by consumers has been steadily increasing, allowing the beverage industry to flourish. 

“Both multi-nationals and local providers have been looking to capitalize on the favorable economic conditions of the market whose size was estimated at almost 32.2 billion liters in 2013, according to the Euromonitor statistics.”

The commercial manager at Sidel further stated that bottled water was the leading soft drinks category in Nigeria. “The inability to access safe drinking water and the poor provision of electricity in Nigeria, especially given the hot weather conditions in the country, continued to contribute to the strong performance of bottled water, which accounts for the bulk of soft drinks sales in volume terms.

Partly due to favorable government policies for domestic producers, other categories of soft drinks saw positive performances in both volume and value terms in 2013.

Diakakis said that Sidel constantly spends its days trying to create the perfect package for milk, water, beer and other beverage categories. 

“We firmly believe such packages are created by using PET, because of its many benefits such as light weight, design flexibility and strength.

Then we create a concept bottle, such as the Sidel PET beer bottle, or our recently introduced RightWeight bottle for water, and then discuss with brand owners and producers about how that design can best be adapted or used for their brands, which can often be done much quicker than the original concept design.”

November 4, 2014; http://ngrguardiannews.com/business/185143-sidel-africa-s-future-beverage-market-depends-on-nigeria