Following the recent roll-out of its trade in your used batteries for discount campaign, Tropical Battery Company Limited is looking to add another 20 per cent from this activity to current revenues annually.

In a notice, the company urged customers to “give us your used batteries (any brand) and get a discount on your next battery purchase”.

Alexander Melville, managing director of Tropical Battery, in an interview with the Jamaica Observer on Monday said that the campaign, tied to its E2 strategy which focuses on education and the environment, serves as a win-win for both customers and the business as each stands to benefit from discounts on new units as well as additional revenues from exports when the lead from these batteries are resold to licensed recyclers.

“We’re one of the largest collectors and exporter of scrap batteries, so we have always tried to encourage people to bring in their old batteries for which we pay them or give them some sort of discount, after which we export them out so that they can be recycled, which is also a win for the environment.”

“We’ve been doing these exports for the last 10 years so our new campaign comes more as a reminder to people that we are still in this business, especially now as we move to ramp up our collections. We currently do about $80 million in scrap exports yearly and we would love to grow that above $100 million next year based on our targeted growth rate of 20-25 per cent per year,” he told the Business Observer.

Melville further said the company, working with third-party collectors, purchases up to 5 tonnes or some 2,000-3,000 individual batteries per year.

Tropical Battery earlier this year acquired a 50 per cent stake in Dominican Republic-based Kaya Energy Group, a solar photovoltaic engineering, procurement, and construction company. A few months ago, the energy storage solutions provider also incorporated a US subsidiary, Tropical Battery USA, LLC, indicating that it has the North American market in its growth plans.

Melville, in a progress report on these and other activities, said plans were now being finalised to commence the sale of some of its products on the Amazon platform, while its Kaya business is starting to contribute to the group’s results. For the April to June quarter revenues for the company rose by 18 per cent to total $782.8 million — 18 per cent above that of the corresponding period in 2022.

“Our business has been going pretty well and we are now in the process of looking at a number of acquisitions, one of which we hope to close by the end of December this year. The acquisition is in a very large market and is a large energy storage business on which we are now working to complete the due diligence process,” he said to the Business Observer.