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Chinese businesses enjoying a hot pot trade across Nigeria

By Chen Jia (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-02-14 08:11

Malian people gather along the road on Thursday to welcome President Hu Jintao to Bamako, Mali. [Qi Bin]

Zhou Jun never imagined she would become a boss of two hotels and two hotpot restaurants in just 8 years.

"My husband left me as he could not understand why I chose to run businesses with 300,000 yuan debt in a remote African country, which he had only heard from sport news," Zhou recalled from her new home in Nigeria.

The 45-year-old used to be the Chinese teacher in a local middle school in Shandong, where she also ran a small factory before 1998.

Today her success in Nigeria is just the tonic to salve the pain of a failed marriage.

Since it ended, she has created the first Chinese tofu food shop in Nigeria and specialized in the spicy hotpots Nigerians have come to love.

"My biggest achievement is making Chinese food culture popular in Nigeria," she said.

"Hundreds of people today kill for a position to work for me or the chance to run a chain-restaurant under my name," she said.

Thanks to increasing cooperation between China and Africa in recent years, Zhou said her business had benefited from better information channels and favorable policies for Chinese.

"I hope Nigeria people better understand that Chinese come here not only to earn money but also to bring them opportunity and service," she said.

Zhou's business was among the 200 private Chinese enterprises which invested in Africa in the past eight years with the help of Africa-invest.net.

It has helped various industries - trade, infrastructure, agriculture, light industry, textile and electronics - establish operations.

A better understanding between the two sides has opened more opportunities for economic cooperation in the face of the global economic crisis, Wang Wenming, president of the Africa-invest.net, told China Daily.

He said that many African countries have weak economic foundations and rely heavily on foreign investments and aid.

"But the investment from America and European countries, the main investors in this region, has largely decreased since the financial crisis," he said.

For example, you can always see building projects abandoned half completed after investment money has dried up, he said.

"China's enterprises have shown strong resilience to the global slowdown, and China's investors have been the least affected by the economic meltdown," he said.

President Hu Jintao is currently on a visit to four African countries to further consolidate friendship and promote the implementation of measures announced at the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in 2006.

China-Africa trade volume hit an all-time high last year, reaching a historic new level of $106.8 billion, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

Trade has soared 30 percent annually between the two sides in the past eight years after total trade volume reached more than $10 billion in 2000.

China's Commerce Minister Chen Deming said China had invested a total of more than $5 billion in African countries by the end of last year, according to a report of the Xinhua News Agency in Jan.

"I plan to invest in another restaurant by 2009, and employ more local people who lost their job in the global economic crisis," said Zhou, who will make a short visit to China to recruit skilled kitchen chiefs this month.