OCP Group — the world's largest exporter of phosphate and phosphate fertiliser — is owned almost entirely by Morocco. The Moroccan state holds about 94% of OCP, with Banque Centrale Populaire owning the remaining ~6% 1. Founded by royal decree in 1920 as the Office Chérifien des Phosphates, it has stayed in national hands for over a century.
The scale is strategic, not symbolic: OCP sits on the large majority of the world's known phosphate-rock reserves and holds roughly a third of the global phosphate market 2 — the mineral base of the fertiliser the world's food supply depends on.
On a desk that mostly documents value leaving Africa, OCP is the counter-case: one of the continent's largest and most globally important companies, almost wholly African-owned, controlling a resource the rest of the world needs. It is the resource chapter of the argument that African ownership at scale is possible — see the full ledger.