• 90% of Export is Crude Oil

2nd largest oil producer in Africa Angola is one of the most oil-dependent economies in the world. It accounts for more than 90 per cent of its exports.

Angola produziert pro Tag gut 1,1 Millionen Barrel Erdöl und ist damit nach Nigeria das zweitgrößte Opec-Mitglied aus Afrika.

Back in 2002, at the end of Angola’s 27-year civil war, the central African country pioneered the so-called “Angola model” wherein it received oil-backed loans from China to finance the building of roads, hydroelectric dams, railways, and the like. It didn’t last very long, though. Unfortunately, this model did not last long. Indeed, as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has noted, Angola has fallen down the list of leading crude suppliers to China as Beijing has increasingly turned to the Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Russia, and other Asian countries.^{1) 2)}

While Angola was the No. 2 exporter of oil to China in 2010, second only to Saudi Arabia, by last year, it had plummeted to No. 8, as reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP).^{3) 4)}

The Angolan Model worked just fine in the early years, with SCMP citing Boston University data showing that between 2000 and 2022, Angola borrowed a whopping $45 billion from China, repaying some of it in oil. But when oil prices crashed in 2014 at the peak of the shale boom, Angola found itself having to pump much more aggressively in order to pay its Chinese debts in one of the many stories of pitfalls of Beijing’s easy money. It was an impossible task for Angola.^{5) 6)}