Shelze Admin · September 2026
How Shelze Vanguard helped Harvestfield turn an industrial ambition into a decision it could build on.
Nigeria distributes tens of millions of insecticidal nets every year. Almost none of them are made here.
Harvestfield Industries Limited had spent decades on the receiving end of that arrangement, building a substantial agrochemical and public-health distribution network. It understood the market, its customers and its opportunities, which raised a question at once simple and consequential: if the business knew this market so well, why was it not manufacturing for it?
The question was never really about whether local manufacturing made strategic sense. The ambition was clear, and a federal government pushing local production of healthcare products had made the direction clearer still. What was less clear was what it would take to make that ambition financially viable. That is where the work between advice and action begins.
A distribution business and a manufacturing business may serve the same market, but financially they are different propositions. Distribution turns inventory and recycles capital quickly. Manufacturing demands significant upfront investment in land, buildings and equipment, and returns depend on utilisation, production ramp-up, pricing, operating costs and the ability to service long-term financing. For Harvestfield the question was therefore not whether to build, but what would have to be true for the investment to work, and what happens if those assumptions change.
Shelze was engaged to help answer that. Our Financial Advisory team worked alongside management on financial modelling and forecasting, advisory support through the development of the project, and due diligence relating to the prospective manufacturing partner. The objective was not another report to sit on a shelf, but a financial instrument through which the project could be understood, challenged and ultimately acted upon.
At the centre of the engagement was a ten-year integrated financial model covering both the existing business and the proposed industrial project. A model is useful only when it lets management see how one decision affects another, so the income statement, cash flow and balance sheet were connected through a single assumptions framework. Changes to exchange rates, production ramp-up, cost escalation, capital expenditure or financing could be traced through the entire business rather than assessed in isolation.
The project also crossed currencies. Equipment, revenues and financing were largely dollar-denominated, while the operating company, its obligations and its tax position were in naira. Rather than letting currency risk sit as a footnote, the model carried an explicit exchange-rate path so management could read the project from both perspectives at once.
Historical performance was treated with the same discipline. Harvestfield’s financial record was not a smooth upward line. There had been difficult periods as well as a significant recovery. Building a forecast around the recovery alone would have produced an attractive but fragile picture. The analysis instead took in the full record and carried existing debt through to run-off, so the proposed investment was tested against the balance sheet Harvestfield would actually carry forward.
The work therefore moved beyond forecasting into financial architecture: how the asset would be held, how it would be made available to the operating entity, how debt would sit against it, and when cash would come under greatest pressure.
The most important output of the work was not a valuation figure. It was a year. Once the model was integrated, it became clear that the project’s greatest financial pressure was not at the beginning. Early periods benefited from moratoria and ramp-up allowances. The real pressure emerged later, when principal repayments began in earnest while production had not yet reached the scale required to make them comfortable.
That distinction can change a project. Identifying the difficult year before capital is committed gives management the opportunity to restructure financing, adjust the production ramp, revisit pricing assumptions or prepare additional liquidity.
The model also let management test alternatives without rebuilding the case each time: capital structures, production assumptions and pricing scenarios examined within one framework. That is what good financial advisory should do: not simply confirm that a strategy works, but make it possible to understand how, when and under what conditions it works.
What began as a question about local manufacturing became part of a wider industrial vision. In February 2026, NEPZA licensed the Harvestfield Free Trade Zone in Ogun State, a medical-products manufacturing zone promoted by Harvestfield, with SNG Health (its joint venture with Vestergaard Sàrl) as the anchor venture.
A factory is a project; a zone is a platform, creating the potential for successive ventures and investments, each carrying its own economics, capital requirements and risks. As the ambition expands, so does the need for financial thinking that can move with it, and that adaptability was central to how we approached the engagement. Structures change, partners change, prices move, policy evolves. A plan that only works under the circumstances that existed on the day it was prepared becomes obsolete quickly. The objective was never to hand Harvestfield a finished document, but to leave management with a framework it could keep interrogating as the project evolved.
There is a version of financial advisory that ends when the model is delivered and the report is bound. The more valuable work begins there: helping management see a decision clearly enough to make it, and challenging it rigorously enough to know when it should change.
For Harvestfield, that meant translating an industrial ambition into numbers that could withstand scrutiny: sizing the capital required, testing the operating assumptions, modelling currency exposure, accounting for existing obligations, identifying the periods of financial stress, and building a framework in which alternatives could be evaluated.
Harvestfield brought the ambition; we helped build the financial architecture around it. That is the work between advice and action: not telling a business what it should do, but giving its decision-makers the clarity and the tools to build what they decide to do. Sometimes that makes a proposal easier to defend. Sometimes it makes one harder to justify. The second is not a failure of the work; it is the reason the work is worth commissioning.