3 months ago
23
By about June 2026, Jamaica’s first formal truck stop and traveller’s halt should be open for business. It will be a dealer-owned and dealer-operated, or dodo facility, under the Regency Petroleum brand in proximity to Regency’s LPG filling plant at Crawford, St Elizabeth.
Regency Petroleum Company CEO Andrew Williams said it would be Jamaica’s first “genuine” truck stop.
“This one is one of a kind in Jamaica. It’s going to be a service station with a convenience store, along with a truck stop; a truck rest stop where we’ll have a parking area for trailers and trucks,” Williams said in an interview with the Financial Gleaner.
The complex will provide lockers, shower stalls and bathroom facilities for the general public, and the truckers in particular.
The Crawford main road is known to be part of a major thoroughfare from east to west on the south side of Jamaica. The community sits close to the Westmoreland-St Elizabeth parish border.
“You find that for the logistics purposes, for all the building materials like sand and aggregates, containers … you’ll find a lot of trailers traversing that route,” between St Elizabeth and Westmoreland, and extending to the resort town of Negril, said Williams.
“Also, during the sugar crop period, you have a number of trailers carrying sugar cane from St Elizabeth to Westmoreland, and they traverse that route,” he said.
Most of the unofficial truck stops in Jamaica, such as those in Runaway Bay, St Ann, and Whitehouse, Westmorland, take advantage of 24-hour restaurants and bars in the area. Other commuters have to compete with them for parking space.
“We’ll have an adequate truck stop where the truck drivers are able to stop, park and rest, and refresh themselves. It will be a 24-hour operation in terms of the convenience store and the service station catering to truckers,” he said.
The cost of developing a gas station is around $200 million, based on previous estimates obtained by the Financial Gleaner. The price tag on the Crawford facility would run higher, but not by much.
“The reason being, the land is already available. So, the only thing additional that we would need to put in for this would be the parking area. Everything would remain basically the same,” Williams said.
“The parking area and the additional shower stalls are not going to be a significant cost, because we’re putting in a four or five-shower stall for about 100 people, plus additional lavatories.”
His best estimate for the capital expenditure on the new facility was in the order of $220 million.
Regency Petroleum will not bear the cost of building out the facility; that will be taken on by the dealer-owner, David Wiggan, who is supplying the land and the finances necessary for the project. However, the petroleum marketing company will assist with branding, including pumps and signage.
Construction of the facility is to begin within the next three to four weeks, Williams said, and open for business a year from then, around mid-2026. Regency will supply fuel ordered from Petrojam.
The petroleum company, which deals in liquefied petroleum gas, also called LPG or cooking gas, operates a gas station network, is building out the gas station network through partnerships, amid other moves to expand the business that was taken public and listed on the junior stock market in 2022.
The Crawford truck stop-service station complex would become Regency Petroleum’s second dodo franchise arrangement, the other being at Whithorn, Westmoreland. The company currently has five service centres in its network, four of which are located in Westmoreland, while the fifth was opened towards the end of last year at Trench Town in Kingston.
The push for growth has seen a near doubling of the company’s revenue flows, from $929 million in 2023 to $1.63 billion last year. Profit also nearly doubled in the same period, from $46 million to $87 million.
Williams is bullish on the results for the first quarter of this year, but said there would be one-off costs weighing on the results, including the spend on the company’s annual general meeting that’s to be held on May 19, four days after its March quarter results are officially due for publication, as well as recurrent expenditures such as fees paid to the Jamaica Stock Exchange and remuneration of the company’s external auditors.
“We have a lot of extraordinary expenses and so this quarter, we will take a hit when it comes down to costs for our AGM, annual recurrences, and so on,” he said.
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