JohnVents Industries: Nigeria’s giant cocoa play with a cleaner equity story

We typically do not look at private companies, but having previously looked at SunBeth, we entered a rabbit hole trying to find the next Presco / Okomu story.

Since we got access to its financials, we decided to give it a sneak peek by looking at its numbers strictly. I am also proudly a son of the Ile-Oluji Kingdom in Ondo State, so it probably explains how I found myself here.

Johnvents Industries Limited is a consequential agro-processing story with a vertically integrated cocoa and agro-commodity processor that has assembled 48,000 MT of processing capacity, crossed N810.8 billion in Group revenue in FY2025. It has done all of this with N330 billion in debt, a supercycle tailwind now fading.

The Group’s principal activities span the importation, processing and export of cocoa and agro-allied commodities, cocoa butter, alkalized cocoa powder, natural cocoa cake, cocoa beans, sesame seed, soya beans, chocolate beverages, palm oil products, and an expanding logistics arm through its subsidiary Haven Hauling Limited. As of the end of FY2025, the Group operates through seven active subsidiaries.

Nigeria is the world’s fourth-largest producer of cocoa, after Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Indonesia, and the crop remains one of the country’s most significant non-oil export earners. Yet for decades, Nigeria exported cocoa beans in raw form, surrendering the bulk of the value-added chain (butter, powder, liquor, chocolate) to European and Asian processors who then sold those derivatives back to African markets at a premium, as we did with oil before Dangote Refinery.

That structural inefficiency is precisely the gap that companies like Johnvents are designed to fill.

The global cocoa derivatives market was valued in excess of $18 billion in 2023 and is growing, driven by demand from the food and beverage, confectionery, and cosmetics industries in Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Cocoa butter alone commands significantly higher margins than raw beans, and alkalized cocoa powder (used in premium confectionery and beverages) is a speciality product with strong pricing power.

Its 18,000 MT facility at Akure and 30,000 MT PCPIL plant at Ile-Oluji, together, form the largest combined cocoa processing footprint in Nigeria. Its 800 hectare farm at Ile-Oluji and Oda closes the loop at the supply end.

Johnvents Trading aggregates beans from local farmers through the LBA network. Haven Hauling moves the product. Johnvents Foods captures the domestic consumer.

The backward integration thesis is structurally sound and, in the context of Nigerian agribusiness, genuinely rare. The macro backdrop during which this infrastructure was assembled happened to be the most favourable cocoa price environment in a generation.

Cocoa futures surged from roughly $2,500 per tonne in early 2023 to a peak above $12,000 by early 2025, driven by consecutive West African crop failures, disease-related supply disruptions, and a speculative squeeze. That tailwind inflated every line on Johnvents’ income statement.

As of April 2026, cocoa trades at approximately $3,200 to $3,500 per tonne, down 57% from the peak, near June 2023 lows, with global surpluses of 287,000 MT projected for 2025/26 and a further 267,000 MT for 2026/27. ICE inventories are at a 19.5-month high.

The structural opportunity that motivated Johnvents’ capital build remains intact. The pricing environment in which it must service its debt has changed materially.

The Naira devaluation of 2023, which saw the official rate move from roughly N460/USD to above N1,500/USD, provided a significant revenue tailwind for FY2024, as export-denominated cocoa revenues translated at a far higher Naira equivalent.

FY2025 revenue growth of 68% was achieved in a more stable Naira environment, making it a higher-quality number in that specific respect.

The FY2025 revenue base was, however, earned when cocoa was still trading in the $6,000 to $8,000 range for much of the year.

Investors evaluating Johnvents today are pricing a business whose FY2026 revenues will be earned in a materially lower commodity price environment. That compression has real implications for top-line performance and debt service capacity.

It is also worth noting that lower cocoa input prices reduce Johnvents’ procurement costs alongside revenues; the processing spread, not the absolute price, is the true margin driver. A processor with the scale and efficiency to maintain its spread at $3,500 cocoa is not necessarily worse off than one operating at $7,000.

Financial performance – the Last 3 years was the easy part

The Group’s revenue grew from N483.8 billion in FY2024 to N810.8 billion in FY2025, a 68% increase that completed a three-year run from N59.8 billion in FY2022. That is a 13x multiplication in three years, driven by a combination of genuine operational scale-up, the Naira devaluation translation benefit, and a global cocoa price environment that was, for much of the period, exceptionally favourable. 2 out of those 3 drivers have now evaporated.

The parent company (Johnvents Industries Limited on a standalone basis) reported N255.3 billion in FY2025 versus N230.6 billion in FY2024, an 11% increase that is more representative of underlying volume performance at the processing entity level. The headline Group figure is dominated by Johnvents Trading Services, which contributed N417.6 billion pre-elimination and whose revenues are closely correlated to cocoa spot prices.

The revenue segmentation is very important. Traded cocoa beans account for 34.2% of Group revenue. Cocoa butter accounts for 28.7%. Cocoa powder, a further 10.1%. That is 73% of Group revenue directly correlated to cocoa prices. The remaining 27% (sesame, soya, cashew, food, and logistics) is real and growing, but it cannot offset a 50% decline in the primary commodity.

We estimate that a sustained cocoa price of $3,000 to $4,000 per tonne, all else equal, implies a Group revenue base 35 to 45% lower than FY2025, call it N450 to N530 billion. That is still a large business. But it is a business with N330 billion in debt, N45.7 billion in annual finance costs, and a fixed cost base that has been scaled for supercycle volumes.

The 20.0% gross margin in FY2025 is the single most encouraging number in these accounts, and it carries more information than the revenue figure does.

A cocoa processor’s gross margin is fundamentally a processing spread (the difference between the landed cost of beans and the realised price of derivatives). During the supercycle, both moved violently, but a processor with forward procurement discipline and adequate storage can maintain or even expand its spread.

Johnvents’ 20% margin, held flat from FY2024 on a materially larger revenue base, suggests exactly that kind of operational discipline.