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Energy and automotive products trader Tropical Battery Company Limited will begin selling its products through Amazon, having registered its trademarks in the United States.
The trademark approvals, granted on November 19, 2024, encompasses product categories such as solar panels, batteries, automotive oils and coolants, Tropical Battery said in a market filing.
Tropical Battery CEO Alexander Melville said the company targeted the Amazon platform as a distribution channel because of his son. From age 15 or 16, Joshua Melville began setting up Amazon accounts of his own, with varying degrees of success – from doing “really well to not so well”, said Melville. In the process, the father learned from the son.
“Honestly, he started it three or more years ago and he was selling all kinds of stuff and doing all kinds of things, and it did well. Based on that, I thought, ‘Hey, will you help me set up ours for Tropical Battery?’” Melville said.
Tropical Battery established its Amazon account over a year ago, with the intervening time used to meet Amazon’s rigorous standards, including obtaining the trademark approvals.
Now the Jamaican company, which owns another battery business in the United States, will be utilising existing warehousing capacity in California, plus the logistical capacity at Amazon, to grow its US presence.
“We can ship a pallet or a container of Caribrake brake fluid to Amazon warehouse in, say, Atlanta. They then pack it out, and then that’s how you can get next-day delivery. Once it’s ordered on the Amazon website, I say, yes, I have it in stock; because they inventory manage it for you, and they charge you, like, a 30 per cent fee,” Melville said.
The addition of Amazon as a distribution channel is one of several initiatives the company is embarking on in coming months. For instance, Tropical Battery Company’s recently acquired American subsidiary, Rose Batteries, is moving to a larger manufacturing and warehousing facility, for which the lease was signed in mid-2024.
Rose Batteries will remain in Silicon Valley but will be relocating from its current 18,000-square-foot complex to a 23,000-square-foot facility.
Tropical will not rebrand Rose Batteries, which is more of a B2B, or business-to-business operation. Nor will Rose sell through the Amazon platform, which is more of a B2C, or business-to-consumer market conduit, Melville said.
Additionally, Rose Batteries is already part of a different online channel, he added.
“Rose is on this platform called DigiKey. It’s a platform like Amazon, but more for engineers,” the Tropical Battery CEO said.
Rose Batteries specialises in battery packs tailored for a wide range of applications, including utility grid solutions, industrial systems, medical devices, robotics and drones. The American company produces batteries of different types, inclusive of traditional lead acid and LPO, or lithium ion phosphate, among others. Its products are shipped to more than 30 countries from its California base.
Over time, the company will give thought to selling customer-facing products through the Amazon platform, Melville said regarding future considerations for Rose’s operation.
Meanwhile, in Jamaica, Tropical Battery is adding a seventh retail store, which will open on March 1 at Tropical Plaza in Half-Way Tree, Kingston.
“This retail store is going to be focused on our new products, like solar power, electric vehicles, electric bikes, and so on,” Melville said.
Within the company’s retail network, the stores carry 80 per cent of what Melville denotes as the decades-old company’s ‘traditional’ products.
More recently, Tropical Battery has ventured into distribution of solar systems, electric bikes and used Tesla electric vehicles.
The new store will flip the ratio, with the nascent Tropical Mobility unit accounting for 80 per cent of the business it will handle.
“We’re putting in Teslas, solar panels and inverters and saying, ‘Hey, we also sell these products.’ Now, this is going to be the first of the seven stores that will be 80 per cent Tropical Mobility – electric cars, bikes, solar panels inverters, and so on,” he said.
The new operation will not be a Tesla dealership, per se, but rather a Tesla-certified service centre, he emphasised.
“We are now certified to service and fix them,” Melville said.
Tropical Battery also handles the importation of Teslas, for which it adds “a 10 per cent markup”, for those people who “just don’t want to have to go on to a Tesla website, get an import permit, and pay duty to bring in the car themselves”, he explained. “They just want to go to a one-stop shop that says, ‘Hey, we’ll warranty it (for) whatever the manufacturer’s warranty is on the parts and everything’ … just as if you bought it directly from Tesla.”
Tropical Battery, which has been in growth mode in recent years, subsequent to its listing on the market in 2020, turned over $2.8 billion in sales revenue in 2023. But as a testament to its aggressive moves and entry into new geographic markets via acquisitions, the company’s nine-month revenue in year 2024 has long surpassed that mark at one-and-a-half times the outturn, at $4.26 billion. Additionally, its $220 million of profit over nine months ending June 2024 has outpaced annual earnings of $140 million in 2023. The company’s full-year results to September 2024 are still pending.
Meanwhile, Melville said son Joshua, 19, may well enter the company someday when the third generation of leaders step up.
Brothers Alexander, Marc and Daniel Jr, who took the reins of Tropical and other family-owned companies from father Daniel Melville, have seven offsprings among them.
“He likes business,” Alexander said of his teenage son. “He’s studying business, and I hope that he, along with some of his cousins, will be a part of the next generation,” the Tropical Battery CEO said.
English (US) ·