•Taiwo Ilesanmi and Gbenga Akanmu
CHEMICALS
Two childhood friends, Taiwo Ilesanmi and Gbenga Akanmu, went from growing up on the same street to working at global chemical giants Dow Chemical and BASF, before building Alliance Chemicals Global. In four years, the company has grown revenue by 1,400% and now supplies manufacturers across industries, as the founders move into local chemical manufacturing.
Business Insider reported that long before Taiwo Ilesanmi and Gbenga Akanmu became business partners, they were simply two boys growing up on the same street in Ibadan.
Their families were friends. They went to school, grew up together, and, as Taiwo remembers it, Akanmu was already trying his hand at business from a young age.
“I would always patronise him,” Ilesanmi said, laughing as he recalled some of Gbenga’s early ventures.
Then life took them in different directions. After secondary school, Ilesanmi moved to the UK, while Akanmu eventually moved to the United States.
Their childhood friendship continued, but their professional lives began to take shape independently. Neither of them knew then that those separate journeys would eventually bring them back together to build Alliance Chemicals Global, a leading supplier of commodities and speciality chemicals in Africa.
Today, the company is positioning itself as more than a chemical distributor. It wants to become part of the infrastructure that helps African manufacturers produce more, source more efficiently, and compete beyond their local markets.
In many ways, it is a story of coming full circle. Before building their own company in 2022, Ilesanmi and Akanmu had spent years learning the chemical business from inside some of its biggest global players.
Ilesanmi’s career took him through management consulting at KPMG before eventually moving into BASF SE, one of the world’s largest chemical companies.
At BASF, he moved across sales, supply chain and management before taking on a role with the company’s UK team. He also had the opportunity to visit major plants in Germany, Turkey and the UK, seeing first-hand how a global chemical manufacturing business operated. The experience changed the way he understood the industry.
“BASF showed me what a large chemical manufacturing company looks like, from manufacturing and supply chain to operations and technical sales,” he said.
But perhaps the most important lesson was that chemicals were not simply about buying and selling products. The real business, Ilesanmi learned, was solving a customer’s problem. That idea would eventually become central to Alliance Chemicals.
Akanmu’s route was different. He began in technology, studying computer science and mathematics, and initially built a career working around financial services. He worked his way from IT support to application development and trading systems, gradually becoming more interested in finance.
“I started as a tech guy, but I always worked in financial services. I began on the help desk, fixing computers in the bank, then moved into application development and maintaining trading systems. That’s really what exposed me to finance,” Akanmu said.
Eventually, he pursued an MBA intending to move into investment banking, imagining a career in New York, London or Switzerland.
Then came an unexpected opportunity. Akanmu was invited to an interview he thought was for Dow Jones.
The names looked close enough that he assumed it was the financial news company. It wasn’t. It was Dow Chemical.
He took the interview anyway—and got the job, joining the company’s finance leadership development programme. The accidental detour became a defining moment in his career.
Over the years, he gained a different perspective from Ilesanmi’s: how large corporations think about capital, risk, investment and the African market.
Together, their experiences gave them a view of the chemical industry from different angles. And when they looked at Africa, they saw a gap.”People will refer to us as a small company, but one that acts very, very globally.
The look and feel of everything we do reflects that global view. I think it’s because the owners have been around and are intentional about doing things really well, using global best practices,” Akanmu stated.
Read More:
https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/leaders/meet-the-friends-who-left-two-of-the-worlds-biggest-chemical-companies-to-build-one/
