Massy eyes US expansion
MASSY Holdings has set its sights on expanding in the United States and Latin America as it consolidates its operation under three core businesses — integrated retail, gas products, and motors and machines.
Gervase Warner, president and chief executive officer of Massy Holdings, who along with Massy Holdings’ executive vice-president and chief financial officer James Mcletchie were in Jamaica for the Jamaica Stock Exchange 19th Regional Investments and Capital Markets conference last week, also said his company will settle down this year to realise the benefits of recent acquisitions, but intends to still keep an eye out for new acquisitions.
“It makes sense if we are looking at the IRP [integrated retail portfolio] business to look at the US and even regions of the US [for further expansion],” Mcletchie told the Jamaica Observer in an interview on the sidelines of the JSE conference at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel. “Our motors business is looking out more broadly, because it is in Colombia already, and that is in Latin America, so they are looking out a little more broadly,” he added.
He, however, said the company doesn’t want to spread itself too thin by expanding too fast in too many countries. “We have to be disciplined about the capital, where we put it, to have scale in those markets to drive growth,” Mcletchie continued.
His CEO, Warner, added that the company will also look to expand the gas business in Latin America as well. “But we are exploring other opportunities elsewhere in the planet, but it is still very early days,” he told the Business Observer while staying away from giving any further specifics.
At the end of 2022 Massy Holdings acquired the Jacksonville, Florida-based, Rowes supermarket chain for US$47 million, marking the first expansion of that business outside the Caribbean. The acquisition increased its integrated retail stores to 67 in six territories and south Florida, with six full-service distribution businesses. The company, in its annual report for 2023, said the Rowes supermarket chain “has outperformed initial expectations”. Massy Holdings has since started to make preparations for pushing further in that market with the acquisition of a 170,000 square foot warehouse space which it said will form the base for “our US distribution business”.
The company, which will celebrate its 101st year in business on Thursday, February 1, established its Massy Distribution (USA) years ago, but in the last two years has been registering several companies with the state of Florida, including Massy Stores (USA) LLC, Massy Integrated Retail (USA) LLC, Massy (USA) Incorporated, and Massy Distribution Properties LLC.
Expanding on the US growth push, Mcletchie said it would come chiefly through acquisitions. Referencing the acquisition of the seven stores in Jacksonville, he said, “We could buy seven more.”
For now, Jamaica is not in the company’s sights for expansion into the integrated retail business. Massy Holdings exited the Jamaica retail business when it sold its Hi-lo business which is now operated by Gracekennedy and Company Limited.
“We would love to come back into Jamaica in the supermarket/retail business, but Jamaica is a very competitive supermarket retail environment, so we would have to find the right opportunity to re-enter Jamaica in supermarket/retail business,” Warner said.
“I think there is huge benefit with the synergies that we have with our other supermarkets across the Caribbean in St Lucia, Barbados, Trinidad, Guyana, and St Vincent. So it would be wonderful to find such an opportunity, and we still continue to search. It would be very irresponsible just to try to jump into the Jamaica supermarket business thinking that we can just show up and just successfully compete. There are very strong competitors here that we respect, and we would want to look for the right opportunity that would makes sense for the Massy Group of Companies.”
In Jamaica, Massy Holdings operates its distribution business and also has a significant stake in the country’s gas products market through its operations of Gas Pro and the recent acquisition of Industrial Gases Limited (IGL).
Jamaica accounts for about
4 per cent of Massy Holdings IRP revenues. Trinidad and Tobago accounts for 32 per cent; Barbados, 23 per cent; Eastern Caribbean, 17 per cent; Guyana, 13 per cent; and the US, 11 per cent.
“We have a very powerful value proposition for the main principals, in that we have a distribution capability that is difficult to replicate from Florida to Guyana and Suriname and everything included. Through a consistent brand called Massy Distribution, we have the scale, we have the logistics, we have the agents, we have the partners, we have the competence to be a delivery and distribution partner of choice. And so we use that
value proposition when we talk to other principals, and clearly here in Jamaica the mandate that the organisation has is for us to go win back other principals, and typically we will be winning them back from somebody else, that’s the way the business works,” Warner added.
Still, wherever it goes and continues to operate, Warner and Mcletchie said it will be done with “a Caribbean heart” as the company focuses on its three core businesses. In recent years it has been divesting its non-core assets, earning US$300 million from that process, funds which have been used to finance its growth in the three core areas on which it now focuses.
“What we have done is to take a whole bunch of companies that are scale in the Caribbean but sub-scale globally [and] reinvest that
US$300 million to create scale so that we can actually compete properly,” Mcletchie said.
But he added that, “Scale is not just about performance. We are destined to show people that we can be successful financially and be good.”
“We are actually rolling out a new vision, a global force for good, an investment holding company with a Caribbean heart,” Warner noted about the new direction the company is taking, with people at the heart of the organisation, going forward after 100 years.
“In these industries where we have some competence and some depth and some scale, when we apply managing or leading our organisations with this Caribbean heart, we find that we are able to unleash another level of performance, which gives us an advantage against our competitors,” Warner added.