Owing to construction delays which caused it to miss the June delivery timeline, lighting and energy company FosRich is pushing to have its new super centre ready for use by the end of this year.

The over 40,000 square metres complex being developed at 76 Molynes Road, which sits adjacent to its current flagship store, will in addition to company operations also house a number of other sublets in the areas of food and business services.

“Once we get practical completion of the building then we are going to take about two months to occupy the space. A lot of the building is now completed with the elevators and some other amenities now being commissioned so we are waiting until about the end of this month to have it handed over to FosRich. We will then use the following two months to prepare the inside in terms of putting in shelves, etc, so that by December we can begin to have to have it occupied,” Managing Director Cecil Foster told the Jamaica Observer while providing an update recently.

Of the five-storeys erected, the bottom level built underground will be used for parking while the first floor will be used by FosRich as its new electrical superstore and showroom. The second floor will be jointly used to house administrative offices for FosRich and that for a number of other business to which the space will be rented. The third and fourth floors are to be respectively occupied by a BPO facility and for FosRich’s new corporate offices.

The near $2-billion project being built by GraceKennedy Pension Fund, which is also the owner of the property on which the building is developed, is to be operated by FosRich under a lease agreement. The centre is expected to create in excess of 1,500 jobs, two-thirds of which is expected to come from the BPO call centre operation to be housed at the facility.

“With the additional spacing to come from the new building, we are looking to expand the foot traffic that usually comes into our other stores. Through all our locations, including the new Drax Hall, St Ann, store, we still have numerous opportunities to reach our customers if we don’t get to make that big splash in December, but we are nonetheless pushing for it,” he said to the Business Observer.

FosRich, which has been moving to build out a more diversified base, is a manufacturer and exporter of PVC pipes, conduits and fittings. Outside of a partnership in which it repairs electrical transformers for the Jamaica Public Service, the company is also the local distributor for a number of lighting, electrical and solar energy products for international brands such as Huawei, Philips Lighting, Victron Energy, Siemens, NEXANS, and General Electric.

Fresh on the heels of acquiring the business of Bayside Supersavers Hardware in Montego Bay, the company in June expanded its footprint in the retail trade, now being able to sell other building and construction items such as lumber, cement and steel.

“Since the acquisition, this business has been doing very well and our sales target remains up there. It was an existing business which we have taken over with the hope of making it much bigger. The Drax Hall store, which has also surprised us with its customer flow and revenues, has likewise been really buoyant in the less than three-month period,” Foster said.

Through its various business segments, FosRich as a more than 25-year-old company is aggressively pushing to achieve its 2027 pinnacle objective in which it wants to grow revenues five-fold over a three-year period. Up to the six-month or half-year mark in June of this year, revenues for the company totalled $1.7 billion with profit of $77.8 million.

At the end of its 2023 financial year, total revenues for the company grew to $3.7 billion, up from $3.4 billion in the prior year.

Having recently ventured in the US market following the opening of its Ashland Tennessee base, the lighting and manufacturing outfit has for the last two months been able to tap into what is touted to be a multi-billion-dollar federal government contracts to supply products for various infrastructural projects to minority business enterprises (MBEs) in that market.

“We are going to be doing a lot of business between the end of this year into next from this location. The interest from contractors for products have been through the roof and we expect to supply the area very well. The products will come from Jamaica and our overseas partners so whatever a project requires from pipes, cables lighting, lumber, we have it. The only thing we can’t supply currently is asphalt or concrete and that’s because we are not yet in these areas,” Foster said.

Expressing cautious optimism in his outlook for future growth of the company, the managing director said that all areas of the business continues to progress well with ones such as solar showing the greatest potential for growth.

“With all areas remaining stable we expect to have an okay situation going into the rest of this year into the next especially if interest rates continue to trend down,” he stated.