TROPICAL Battery Company Limited is now positioning to cross over to the Main Market of Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE) as the company continues to witness robust growth and looks to unlock greater opportunities in the coming years.

In a notice posted to JSE late last week the energy storage and power generation solutions company, which has operations in Jamaica, Dominican Republic and the US, said it expects to make the transition before the end of this year, pending the requisite regulatory approvals.

Tropical’s crossover will make them the 58th company listed on the main market and the seventh to graduate from the junior market, following Lasco Manufacturers and Distributors which did so this year. After only four years in its transition sees it giving up about six years of a 10-year tax incentive granted to companies listed on the junior market.

Listed on the junior market since 2020 the company, which has now surpassed $500 million of the $750-million junior market share capital limit, is on the hunt to secure more value for its shareholders. Having witnessed a ballooning of revenues which moved from $1.8 billion in 2020, sales for the company have since then grown three-fold, forecast to reach $5.7 billion at the end of its current financial year in September.

CEO of Tropical Battery Alexander Melville, in underscoring that the company has definitely grown a lot, said the imminent transition should further position it for more growth.

“We will continue this growth on the main market. We have a team made up of overseas coaches and a strategy plan to help us reach more of our growth objectives. We want to list eventually on a US market, three to five years down the road, but we want to be much bigger before we pursue this — and our cross over to the main market, obviously, will help us with this,” he told the Jamaica Observer in an interview on Friday.

Some of the benefits of listing on the main market include increased visibility and credibility, having appeal to a larger investor base, access to more capital to go after greater growth and expansion, and a stronger corporate governance system — all of which Tropical intends to take advantage.

The successful acquisition of Rose Electronics Distributing Company (Rose Batteries) earlier this year, a company based in San Jose, California, in the US, has significantly helped to push Tropical in earning more than 50 per cent of its revenues in US dollars — out-turns which the company plans to grow even further.

Operating in what Melville describes as a “sexy industry”, the growth of the energy storage space — which he sees as one to grow in leaps and bounds as more people seek after alternative energy storage solutions — is also one filled with growing opportunities of which Tropical wants to take advantage.

“We think power storage, which is what we currently do some of, is a massively growing market; it is huge for companies such as Tesla which sells cars and some amount of power storage solutions. We are in that space right now with lithium-ion phosphates but we are looking at even cleaner solutions. We think that outside of what we already offer there are also safer technologies out there, which we are exploring, and our battery business in the energy/power storage segment is focused on doing some of that even as we continue with core operations,” Melville said.

“In looking at Tesla’s earnings for just last quarter we see that their energy/power storage business grew faster than any other sector in that business, including car sales, so we see where this space is exploding as people want to be able to store energy for use later. We are already in the space and we really like it, so we want to grow and expand in the area,” he added.

Bullish on plans for future growth, the CEO said with at least three emerging opportunities from its active pipeline of potential acquisitions the company should in the next few years double down on more opportunities in the energy storage space.

“While we are not actively looking to do any more acquisitions for the rest of this year we are planning for around 2025/26 to embark on more activities in this area. We do have a pipeline of companies we are looking at but we are not seriously exploring any [at the moment] as we want to first absorb more growth while we think about which of those three companies to choose by 2025,” Melville stated.