This list includes notable companies with primary headquarters located in the country. The industry and sector follow the Industry Classification Benchmark taxonomy. Organizations which have ceased operations are included and noted as defunct. Contact online >>
This list includes notable companies with primary headquarters located in the country. The industry and sector follow the Industry Classification Benchmark taxonomy. Organizations which have ceased operations are included and noted as defunct.
The top export opportunities for Guinea-Bissau according to the relatedness index, were Cocoa Shells (0.013), Gold (0.013), Cocoa Beans (0.011), Crustaceans (0.011), and Manganese Ore (0.011). Relatedness measures the distance between a country''s current exports and each product. The barchart show only products that Guinea-Bissau is not
The economy of Guinea-Bissau comprises a mixture of state-owned and private companies. [3] Guinea-Bissau is among the world''s least developed nations and one of the 10 poorest countries in the world, and depends mainly on agriculture and fishing.
The main agricultural products are food crops such as potato, cassava, rice, beans, yams, tropical fruits, and sugar-cane. Fishing . Guinea-Bissau has a coastline of approximately 718 kilometers, making the fishing industry a significant contributor to the national economy.
Merchandise Trade summary statistics data for Guinea-Bissau (GNB) including exports and imports, applied tariffs, top export and import by partner countries and top exported/imported product groups, along with development indicators from WDI such as GDP, GNI per capita, trade balance and trade as percentage of GDP for year 2021
The economy of Guinea-Bissau comprises a mixture of state-owned and private companies.[3] Guinea-Bissau is among the world''s least developed nations and one of the 10 poorest countries in the world, and depends mainly on agriculture and fishing. Cashew crops have increased remarkably in recent years, and the country ranked ninth in cashew production for the year 2019.[4]
Guinea-Bissau exports to Asia non-fillet frozen fish and seafood, peanuts, palm kernels, and timber. License fees for fishing in their sea-zone (Gulf of Guinea) provide the government with some small revenue. Rice is the major crop and staple food. Due to European regulations, fish and cashew-nuts exports to Europe are totally prohibited as well as agriculture products in general.
From a European viewpoint, the economic history of the Guinea Coast is largely associated with slavery. Indeed, one of the alternative names for the region was the Slave Coast. When the Portuguese first sailed down the Atlantic coast of Africa in the 1430s, they were interested in gold. Ever since Mansa Musa, king of the Mali Empire, made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1325, with 500 slaves and 100 camels (each carrying gold) the region had become synonymous with such wealth. The trade from sub-Saharan Africa was controlled by the Islamic Empire which stretched along Africa''s northern coast. Muslim trade routes across the Sahara, which had existed for centuries, involved salt, kola, textiles, fish, grain and slaves.[5]
As the Portuguese extended their influence around the coast, Mauritania, Senegambia (by 1445) and Guinea, they created trading posts. Rather than becoming direct competitors to the Muslim merchants, the expanding market opportunities in Europe and the Mediterranean resulted in increased trade across the Sahara.[6] In addition, the Portuguese merchants gained access to the interior via the Sénégal and Gambia rivers which bisected long-standing trans-Saharan routes.[7]
The Portuguese brought in copper ware, cloth, tools, wine and horses. Trade goods soon also included arms and ammunition. In exchange, the Portuguese received gold (transported from mines of the Akan deposits), pepper (a trade which lasted until Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498) and ivory.[7]
There was a very small market for African slaves as domestic workers in Europe, and as workers on the sugar plantations of the Mediterranean. The Portuguese found they could make considerable amounts of gold transporting slaves from one trading post to another, along the Atlantic coast of Africa. Muslim merchants had a high demand for slaves, which were used as porters on the trans-Saharan routes, and for sale in the Islamic Empire. The Portuguese found Muslim merchants entrenched along the African coast as far as the Bight of Benin.[7]
Before the arrival of the Europeans, the African slave trade, centuries old in Africa, was not yet the major feature of the coastal economy of Guinea. The expansion of trade occurs after the Portuguese reach this region in 1446, bringing great wealth to several local slave trading tribes. The Portuguese used slave labour to colonize and develop the previously uninhabited Cape Verde islands where they founded settlements and grew cotton and indigo. They then traded these goods, in the estuary of the Geba River, for black slaves captured by other black peoples in local African wars and raids.
The slaves were sold in Europe and, from the 16th century, in the Americas. The Company of Guinea was a Portuguese governative institution whose task was to deal with the spices and to fix the prices of the goods. It was called Casa da Guiné, Casa da Guiné e Mina from 1482 to 1483 and Casa da Índia e da Guiné in 1499. The local African rulers in Guinea, who prosper greatly from the slave trade, have no interest in allowing the Europeans any further inland than the fortified coastal settlements where the trading takes place. The Portuguese presence in Guinea was therefore largely limited to the port of Bissau.
As with the other Portuguese territories in mainland Africa (Portuguese Angola and Portuguese Mozambique), Portugal exercised control over the coastal areas of Portuguese Guinea when first laying claim to the whole region as a colony. For three decades there are costly and continuous campaigns to suppress the local African rulers. By 1915 this process was complete, enabling Portuguese colonial rule to progress in a relatively unruffled state - until the emergence of nationalist movements all over Africa in the 1950s.
For a brief period in the 1790s the British attempted to establish a rival foothold on an offshore island, at Bolama, but by the 19th century the Portuguese were sufficiently secure in Bissau to regard the neighbouring coastline as their own special territory. It was therefore natural for Portugal to lay claim to this region, soon to be known as Portuguese Guinea, when the European scramble for Africa began in the 1880s. Britain''s interest in the region declined since the end of the British slave trade in 1807. After the abolition of slavery in the Portuguese overseas territories in the 1830s, the slave trade went into serious decline.
Portugal''s main rivals were the French, their colonial neighbours along the coast on both sides - in Senegal and in the region which became French Guinea. The Portuguese presence in Guinea was not disputed by the French. The only point at issue was the precise line of the borders. This was established by agreement between the two colonial powers in two series of negotiations, in 1886 and 1902–5. Until the end of the 19th century, rubber was the main export.
In 1951, when the Portuguese government overhauled the entire colonial system, all Portugal''s colonies, including Portuguese Guinea, were renamed Overseas Provinces (Províncias Ultramarinas). New infrastructures were built for education, health, agriculture, transportation, commerce, services, and administration.
Cashew, peanut, rice, timber, livestock and fish were the main economic productions. The port of Bissau was one of the main employers and a very important source of taxes for the province''s authorities.
The fight for independence began in 1956, when Amílcar Cabral founded the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (Portuguese: African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde), the PAIGC. In 1961, when a purely political campaign for independence had made predictably little progress, the PAIGC adopted guerrilla tactics. Although heavily outnumbered by Portuguese troops (approximately 30,000 Portuguese to some 10,000 guerrillas), the PAIGe had the great advantage of safe havens over the border in Senegal and Guinea, both recently independent of French rule.
Several communist countries supported the guerrillas with weapons and military training. The conflict in Portuguese Guinea involving the PAIGC guerrillas and the Portuguese Army was the most intense and damaging of all Portuguese Colonial War. Thus, during the 1960s and early 1970s, Portuguese development plans promoting strong economic growth and effective socioeconomic policies, like those applied by the Portuguese in the other two theaters of war (Portuguese Angola and Portuguese Mozambique), were not possible. In 1972 Cabral set up a government in exile in Conakry, the capital of neighbouring Guinea. It was there, in 1973, that he was assassinated outside his house - just a year before a left-wing military coup in Portugal dramatically altered the political situation.
By 1973 the PAIGC controlled most of the interior of the country, while the coastal and estuary towns, including the main population and economic centres, remained under Portuguese control. The village of Madina do Boé in the southeasternmost area of the territory, close to the border with neighbouring Guinea, was the location where PAIGC guerrillas declared the independence of Guinea-Bissau on September 24, 1973. The war in the colonies was increasingly unpopular in Portugal itself, as the people got weary of war and balked at its ever-rising expense. Following the coup d''état in Portugal in 1974, the new left-wing revolutionary government of Portugal began to negotiate with the PAIGC and decided to offer independence to all the overseas territories.
As his brother Amílcar Cabral had been assassinated in 1973, Luís Cabral became the first president of independent Guinea-Bissau in the time after independence was granted on September 10, 1974. Already as the President of Guinea-Bissau, Luís Cabral tried to impose a planned economy in the country, and supported a socialist model that left the economy of Guinea-Bissau itself ruined. Similarly, the repression imposed on the population by his authoritarian single-party regime,[8] and severe food shortages, also left marks.
In 1985 the first Chinese oversees fishing fleet to go abroad was sent to Guinea-Bissau, 13 trawlers from the China National Fisheries Corporation.[10]
In May 1997 Guinea-Bissau joined the francophone West African Monetary Union. Consequently, National Bank of Guinea-Bissau was converted as a national branch of Central Bank of West African States, and the national currency Guinea Bissau peso was replaced by West African CFA franc.[11]
Following the April 2012 coup d''État growth plunged to reach -1.5% of GDP. In 2013, the country''s GDP grew only by 0.9%. This low growth level during a period of democratic transition is explained by a combination of low administrative efficiency, low investments on account of the political instability and a bad cashew export season.[12] Key macroeconomic indicators estimated by the African Development Bank are presented in the chart below:
Intermittent fighting between Senegalese-backed government troops and a military junta destroyed much of the country''s infrastructure and caused widespread damage to the economy in 1998; the civil war led to a 28% drop in GDP that year, with partial recovery in 1999. Agricultural production is estimated to have fallen by 17% during the conflict. Cashew nut output, the main export crop, declined in 1998 by an estimated 30%. World cashew prices dropped by more than 50% in 2000, compounding the economic devastation caused by the conflict.
Because of high costs, the development of petroleum, phosphate, and other mineral resources is not a near-term prospect. The country produces 400,000 barrels/day of petrol.
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2017.[13]
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