Adeniji Adeyemi’s Starlink is Nigeria’s $550m export leader

On a late-March morning in 2021, a chartered vessel eased away from Calabar Port loaded with 7,000 metric tonnes of Nigerian cocoa beans — the first bulk cocoa shipment from that port in 14 years. The cargo belonged to Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd, and on the quay, its managing director, Adeniji Adeyemi, watched a long-held argument sail into view: Nigeria could, in fact, earn serious money from something other than oil.

Adeyemi is not a celebrity founder in the Silicon Valley sense. There are no viral keynote speeches or breathless social media threads. What he does have is a grip on the gritty, low-margin world of agricultural trading — and a company that, by several official counts, has become Nigeria’s largest non-oil exporter, moving roughly $550 million worth of goods a year.

Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd is a Lagos-based export house that started life as an offshoot of a family cocoa business. The company “emanated from R.A. Adeniji Enterprises,” a cocoa trading outfit that has supplied international buyers for more than half a century. In 1999, the modern Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd was formed and then incorporated in November 2002 to formalize that legacy and broaden it into a full-scale commodities export platform.

Adeyemi — full name Muritadha Adeyemi Adeniji — grew up around that trade. In interviews he has called cocoa “my father’s business” and admitted he almost walked away from it after a series of early crises. “Hunger and desperation” kept him in the game, he has said, a line that sounds less like bravado and more like the frank memory of someone who has watched global prices crash more than once.

He didn’t arrive as a village trader without options. Adeyemi is part of Nigeria’s educated post-oil generation and is being celebrated by the University of Ilorin as one of its distinguished alumni, honored alongside central bankers, CEOs and public officials. But instead of chasing a conventional corporate career, he doubled down on commodities, gradually moving from buying bags in rural depots to structuring export finance, logistics and risk in a volatile global market.

Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd’s own story, as told by the company, is one of methodical scale. Within its first five years, Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd grew to annual turnover of 2–3 billion naira. Today, the company says it generates about $500 million in annual turnover — a figure that broadly aligns with independent export data and underscores how far the business has come from its small trading roots.

Export reports from Nigerian authorities for 2024 and 2025 consistently place Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd among the top two non-oil exporters, alongside fertilizer giant Indorama. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd accounted for roughly 10% of Nigeria’s $1.79 billion non-oil exports; by the first half of the year, it held close to 9% of $3.225 billion in exports. Annualizing those shares lands the company’s export value comfortably in the neighborhood of $550 million — a staggering figure for a business built on crops, not crude.

What exactly is moving through Adeyemi’s pipelines? Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd’s core basket is classic West African: raw cocoa beans, raw cashew nuts, sesame seeds and shea nuts, along with the jute sacks and haulage services that make the whole operation work. A decade ago, the company was already shipping fully fermented Nigerian cocoa beans to Malaysia, the Netherlands and Germany; those markets, plus the United States, Turkey and India, remain among its key destinations today as chocolate makers and snack companies scour the globe for supply.

Adeyemi has also become something of a public intellectual for this world. He is a regular voice at trade conferences and cashew industry meetings, warning about foreign buyers disrupting the value chain by purchasing directly from farmers and urging Nigeria to insist on proper grading, traceability and value addition. In one widely cited interview, he argued that the cashew industry alone could generate tens of billions of dollars a year for Nigeria if the country stopped exporting raw nuts and invested seriously in processing.

Crucially, he is putting capital behind that rhetoric. Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd, working with regional investment partners, is developing tens of thousands of hectares of farmland across West Africa and has acquired what it describes as Nigeria’s largest cocoa processing facility in Mowe, Ogun State. The plant, expected to come fully onstream producing cocoa liquor, butter and powder, is designed to shift Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd up the value chain from raw beans to semi-finished inputs for chocolate manufacturers.

Then there is the logistics play. The 7,000-tonne Calabar shipment in 2021 was more than a photo opportunity. The move required overcoming shallow draft issues at the port and, by Adeyemi’s own account, spending significantly more to guarantee safe passage of the chartered vessel to the United States. It was a bet that unlocking alternative ports — not just the chronically congested Lagos harbours — could shave time off export cycles and make Nigerian commodities more competitive.

All of this raises the inevitable valuation question.

Because Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd is privately held, there is no public earnings report or market cap to lean on. What we do have is export value and sector benchmarks. A trading house clearing roughly $550 million in annual exports, in a market where net margins are thin but volumes are sticky, could plausibly command a valuation somewhere between 0.5x and 1x revenue, depending on debt levels, asset base and the quality of long-term supply contracts. That rough math would put Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd’s enterprise value in the mid-nine figures — several hundred million dollars — even before you factor in the upside from its processing plant and farmland ventures. It’s an estimate, not a disclosed number, but it hints at the scale of what Adeyemi has built.

Adeyemi himself tends to wave away the billionaire talk. At Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd’s 25th anniversary, as stakeholders celebrated Nigeria’s cocoa export value jumping sharply in just a few years, he was more interested in preaching about how cocoa could anchor Nigeria’s diversification if government got the basics right: rural roads, port dredging, long-term credit and consistent policy.

That pragmatism may be his real edge. Unlike many Nigerian conglomerates that pivoted into export once the naira crashed and dollar earnings became fashionable, Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd has been in this grind for decades. The company is present in virtually every cocoa-producing zone in the country, with a network of licensed buying agents, warehouses and finance arrangements that link smallholders to ships.

For policymakers, Adeyemi’s trajectory offers a useful counter-narrative to the idea that Nigeria’s future lies only in tech unicorns or mega-refineries. Here is a businessman who took a legacy commodity, wrapped modern logistics and finance around it, and built a $550 million export engine that now consistently ranks at the top of the non-oil league tables.

The bigger question is whether the country can produce ten more companies like Starlink Global & Ideal Ltd — in cocoa, yes, but also in cashew, sesame, shea, fruits and even services — or whether Adeyemi’s story will remain the outlier that proves how hard the path still is. For now, as another season of beans and nuts moves from Nigerian soil to distant factories, the quiet tycoon from the cocoa sheds has made his point: there is serious money to be made beyond oil, if you are willing to live with the mud, the risk and the slow, patient work of moving ship after ship out to sea.