Operations, distribution and China Africa trade

I am Nwobodo Chukwueloka Collins: Collins Nwobodo in conversation, Chukwueloka C. N. on a contract. I run Haiqing Classic Brands Nigeria Ltd, registered in Nigeria as RC 9104682 and addressed as HCBNL in the market. We operate a business-to-business marketplace where manufacturers, importers and distributors list their range, and where retailers, resellers, institutions and event buyers order that range in bulk.

The business exists because of a specific failure. Wholesale in Nigeria has traditionally run on hearsay: a buyer cannot learn what something costs without opening a negotiation, and cannot prove afterwards what was agreed. Every order on HCBNL carries a stated price in naira, a stated availability, a record and a delivery destination. That is the whole proposition, and it is deliberately unglamorous, because the category’s failure modes are unglamorous, stock that was never there, a price that changes on contact, and a delivery that does not arrive.

I founded Haiqing Classic Brands Nigeria Ltd and I run it as Chief Executive. That means the strategy, the operations, the supplier relationships and the commercial model are mine to get right, and mine to answer for when they are not.

Being young in this seat has one real advantage and one real cost. The advantage is that I have no habits to defend: when the numbers say a category is not working, I can close it without also closing an argument I made five years ago. The cost is that credibility has to be earned in public, repeatedly, with evidence rather than with seniority. So I publish the reasoning. The writing on this site is not thought leadership in the brochure sense. It is the working, shown, so that anybody deciding whether to trade with HCBNL or to back me can check it.

What I want to be measured on is unglamorous and specific: whether the stock was really there, whether the price held, whether the delivery arrived, and whether the people who work with me ended the year better than they started it.

I hold a Bachelor of Science in Pure and Industrial Chemistry. The training was analytical: measure the thing, control the variables, do not trust a result you cannot reproduce. I did not stay in the laboratory, but I have never stopped working that way. It is why I would rather compute a contrast ratio than eyeball one, and why I distrust a growth figure until I know the base it grew from.

My career moved quickly into business-facing roles. Through hands-on responsibility in operations coordination, inventory management, procurement, logistics and executive support, I developed a sustained interest in structured business management and organisational leadership. Six years on, that interest is what is taking me back to formal study.

A defining feature of my professional life has been long-term engagement with Chinese enterprises operating in Nigeria. Over several years I worked closely with Chinese managers, technicians and business owners across consumer electronics, retail distribution and resource procurement. I supported daily operations, sat in meetings and negotiations, and served as a Chinese-English interpreter so that two teams could agree on the same number rather than two polite versions of it.

What I took from those years is not a set of anecdotes but a set of habits. Chinese enterprises in this market run on operational discipline, cost control, supply chain coordination and long-term planning. I watched cultural understanding, teamwork and structured management systems do more for resilience than capital did. Those observations are the reason HCBNL looks the way it does: systematic, priced in full, and recorded.

Alongside HCBNL I founded GetSchool Technology Ltd, which is building getschool.app, a platform for schools, and Afterbi at afterbi.com, operations software for businesses that run on stock, orders and suppliers. Both are in build rather than launched, and I would rather say so than describe a roadmap in the present tense.

The through line is not that software is fashionable. It is that every business I have worked in fails in the same place: a number exists somewhere and is not in front of the person deciding. In wholesale that is a price nobody can see without opening a negotiation. In a school it is a record that lives in three books and one person's memory. In operations it is a stock position that was true on Monday. The fix is the same shape each time, which is why I am building the same shape three times.

I am not a career engineer and do not present as one. What I bring is the operator's half: I have carried the problem these products solve, I know which shortcuts cost money six months later, and I decide what gets built. The software is judged the way the trade is judged, on whether the thing it promised actually happened.

Much of my work is commercial analysis: territory by territory, salesperson by salesperson, customer by customer. I build the reporting that tells a sales organisation what is actually happening: year-on-year movement, year-to-date achievement against target, customer-level trend, and the difference between the two.

That difference is usually the finding. A territory can post triple-digit year-on-year growth and still be failing, because the growth came off a small base while the target went untouched. A contributor can decline year-on-year and still be one of the most valuable people in the business. Reporting that cannot separate those two stories is decoration. I have spent a lot of time making sure mine can, which is also why the report engine on this site starts from the data and not from a slide.

I am applying to read for a postgraduate degree in international business. The choice is not sentimental and it is not a change of direction. My work already sits on the interface between Chinese manufacturing and West African wholesale trade, and I have been practising international business for six years without the theory that goes with it.

There are four things I want that I cannot teach myself well. Exchange rate exposure and trade finance for a firm of my size. Tariff structure, rules of origin and what the continental free trade agreement actually changes. Market entry and internationalisation strategy, so that the decision about which corridor to open next is a framework rather than a hunch. And a research method rigorous enough to test my own assumptions, since I have a commercial interest in the answers and would rather be corrected than confirmed.

My intended research is on price and stock transparency and what it does to transaction costs in West African wholesale. I have transaction level data from an operating marketplace across 36 states to test it against, which is the part of this I could not get from any other position.