July 14, (THEWILL) – Alhaji Kamoru Yusuf, otherwise known as Kam, Kam Wire or Kamal alongside his wife Bolanle, are the brains behind Nigeria’s first independently owned cold roll steel complex, located in Kwara State. The steel factory produces different types of nails in addition to wire mesh for concrete reinforcement, binding wires and roofing sheets, as well as other building materials.
The company has five factories in Ilorin, the Kwara state capital and a granite quarry just outside the city. Over a million bags of nails and 1.3 million tonnes of roofing sheets pour out of Kam’s factories to supply builders in Nigeria and West Africa. His steel plant called Kam Industries with warehouses holding rows and rows of nail-making machines is in many ways his own way of providing a local solution to his supply chain problems.
But how did his business journey start? Kam left his uncle under who he was an apprentice in 1987 with a meagre N10,000, mainly because of his uncle’s unwillingness to let him go. Unperturbed, Kam travelled to Lagos to acquire goods for his new business. He met an Igbo trader and friend who gave him N100,000 when he heard Kam’s story. A few years later, Kam received a major breakthrough in the form of a credit facility worth N500,000 from Oscar James, a foreigner who was a wire rod wholesaler and nail producer in Kwara, which he used to purchase wire rods for making nails. He made N200,000 monthly from the loan and he bought his first house and married his wife who aggressively pushed her husband’s goods into new regions. She would drive their only pickup truck from Kwara south to push their products into the larger markets of Ibadan, Oshogbo and Lagos. It is an arrangement that still stands today. She handles the marketing while Kam handles the manufacturing.
When Oscar James exited the Nigerian market in 1996, Kam acquired three of their nail-making machines. While the acquisition was a net positive, it brought on a new set of challenges, mostly in the form of competition from more established players in the nail-making industry. Nail producers for whom he had once distributed refused to supply him with raw material. His income vanished; but this hardship provoked a new level of exploration and discovery as he learned how to innovate. He had to develop himself and was compelled to design the machine himself so he could buy wire rods somewhere else and process them into the hoarded drawing wire himself. He built his first drawing machine himself after many rounds of trial and error, employing a basic knowledge of rotors, gears, mechanics and power.
The self-taught engineer with the support of his wife, succeeded in turning the N10,000 he got from his uncle into over a $300-million industrial conglomerate. And he did so without political connections supposedly or even a high school education. He attributes the rise of Kam Industries to aggressive manufacturing, hard work and good old-fashioned entrepreneurship. Kam Industries employs around 200 female workers. According to him, the idea came about after numerous trips to source raw materials in China, where Kam noticed most of the machine operators were women. Though his initial purpose was simply female empowerment, Kam prefers the female workers as he says they’re trustworthy and stable.
