The Nigerian Society of Engineers, Lagos Branch, took 40 of its members on Tuesday to three firms along the Lagos-Sagamu Expressway, opening talks that could place ten university students inside XCMG Nigeria's yard for half-year industrial attachments and give fresh graduates a shot at training and possible recruitment.
Leading the delegation, branch chairman Olukorede Kesha praised XCMG general manager Sam Wang for a previous ₦5 million donation to the society and for supplying what she called "durable construction equipment," saying the firm had offered to host the students and mentor young engineers. Wang, whose company has operated in Nigeria for over two decades with 30 Chinese and more than 120 Nigerian staff, told the visitors that XCMG's workshops and assembly lines were open for technical exchange and skills transfer.
Kesha said the tour was part of the society's mandatory continuous professional development programme, noting that the branch would now recommend XCMG to members across all engineering disciplines. The engineers also visited Howo Sinotruk Nigeria and CBC Global Civil and Building Construction Nigeria Ltd., holding facility tours and interactive sessions at each stop.
The society plans to formalise the attachment slots and graduate trainee placements within the next quarter.
XCMG's readiness to bankroll student attachments looks less like charity and more like a calculated move to lock in future customers: every trainee who learns on its machines leaves school predisposed to specify the same brand when designing projects or drawing up procurement lists.
Globally, Chinese equipment makers are replicating this "train-the-user" model from Latin America to Southeast Asia, turning technical cooperation into a soft credit line that secures market share without the political heat of direct government loans.
For Nigeria, where public universities lack modern construction-machinery labs, the deal quietly transfers training costs to a foreign supplier while creating a pipeline of Nigerian engineers who can maintain and eventually assemble heavy equipment locally—an incremental step towards reducing import dependency.
Watch whether the federal Ministry of Works incorporates XCMG-certified trainees into its forthcoming road-maintenance contracts, a move that would entrench the firm inside Nigeria's public-procurement ecosystem for decades.
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