ADDITIONAL NOTES FOR THE VIDEO CLIP ABOVE:
Since the 1970s, Nigeria has hosted several vehicle assembly plants for well-known European brands. A couple of examples are listed below:
Assembly Plant for British Leyland Motor Corporation (now defunct)
Assembly Plant for Peugeot of France (alive and thriving)
Assembly Plant for Volkswagen of Germany (now defunct)
Anambra Motor Manufacturing Company (alive and thriving joint venture between Daimler-Benz AG of Germany and the Nigerian Government)
But local assembly of European vehicles from imported knockdown components is not the only thing happening in Nigeria. Genuine vehicle manufacturing is going on as well.
Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing (IVM) Limited is a privately-owned Nigerian motor company that manufactures buses, luxury saloon cars, SUVs and trucks in Anambra State, Eastern Nigeria.
What makes IVM Ltd quite unique on the continent is its vertical integration. The Nigerian motor company, established by Mr. Innocent Nwala in 2007, owns several subsidiaries that supplies components for the making the vehicle.
One subsidiary company produces plastic and rubber components and sells some of it to the vehicle-making parent company. The rest is sold to external customers.
The glass-manufacturing subsidiary supplies glass components to the parent IVM company when it is not fulfilling contracts for external customers.
The metal smelting subsidiary supplies metallic components and flat metal sheets to the parent company. Another subsidiary also exists for making tyres for the vehicles made by IVM Limited.
Seventy percent of the components used by the Eastern Nigeria-based motor company to build its vehicles are manufactured domestically. The remainder are imported from abroad.
That said, Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing (IVM) Limited does not seem to have its own in-house design team for its civilian vehicles. A lot of the SUVs, trucks and saloon cars (sedans) built by the company are based on existing Chinese designs.
By contrast, IVM Limited has created a team of in-house designers specifically for its military contracts with Nigeria's Air Force and Army.
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VEHICLE MANUFACTURING IN EASTERN NIGERIA