During a recent project conducted by africon with focus on the wood working machinery market in Nigeria, africon GmbH identified 107 furniture manufacturing companies and 14 machine distributors focusing specifically on the furniture manufacturing market.
By holding expert interviews with a big number of manufacturers and distributors it became quite clear that the furniture manufacturing sector in Nigeria is very much quality oriented when it comes to purchasing machinery. This stands in contrast to many other industrial sectors that are clearly driven by price when it comes to purchasing e.g. in the steel industries.
The slide of the month August 2017 shows that during economically difficult periods price is starting to become the underlying factor even though quality is still considered to be very important. Therefore, the countries exporting high quality machinery have lost a big market share to countries exporting low price machinery. Consequently, it would be important for high quality machinery suppliers to widen their portfolio containing a lower priced machine that still meets all basic quality requirements.