ARC Manufacturing Limited has acquired the 26,000-square foot property located at 14 Bell Road, which previously housed Starfish Oils Limited, adding to its 20-acre lumber treatment and construction material-producing plant.

The acquisition of the property, which took place last month, was financed from the company’s cash resources, Norman Horne, executive chairman, told the Jamaica Observer following a tour of the facility with a team from the NCB Financial Group led by Chairman Michael Lee-Chin.

“We’ll be using that area to build out and grow even greater our cement operation, and that includes storage of all the different sizes of cement bags,” Devon Brooks, the general manager responsible for commerce, disclosed.

Last year ARC Manufacturing entered into a five-year deal with Caribbean Cement Company Limited to distribute cement, extending an already existing 10-year arrangement. The new facility has been designated to store 250,000 bags of retail cement and 200-plus large bulk bags of the commodity.

So far, the company has renovated the space and removed the boundary walls that will create lateral access to the new property. There are no immediate plans for new, Brooks responded when asked.

He added that the adjoining space will resolve some logistics challenges the company faced with storage capacity and also accommodating delivery trucks.

“It will allow us to treat logistics aspects as it eases turnaround with our trucks, and so we can meet our customer demands even greater. As you can clearly see here that can become very cumbersome — a lot of traffic in that location,” Brooks pointed out.

“ARC is one of the only companies in Jamaica that boasts 24-hour delivery, and certainly a facility like that will allow us to even fulfil even shorter delivery expectations for our customers,” he continued.

The commercial manager is, however, expanding the cement distribution segment of the company boasting that ARC is Caribbean Cement Company’s largest customer in Jamaica.

In addition to the new property acquisition, Brooks also revealed that the company has expanded its retail space at the original Bell Road property.

“We are moving from 8,000 square feet to in excess of 30,000 square feet of warehouse space as well as floor store space. We are moving from an operation where we had over-the-counter to now a supermarket-style layout where persons can go and pick up the items from the shelf themselves,” he informed the Caribbean Business Report.

“And certainly with the new space we will be integrating new technology, new bar code system, where persons can easily identify and help themselves with easy scans and certainly we’re bringing our First World-type of feel to Three Miles,” he added.

When asked if ARC will introduce the same model to its Montego Bay location, Brooks noted that the immediate focus is to fine-tune the retail operation in Kingston. He added that the company’s focus at this time is organic and inorganic growth.

“And certainly you can grow by adding locations or you can grow by becoming even more efficient at how you distribute and how you get to your customers…We would have employed both those strategies in our growth so far. We would have acquired a new location and we would have gotten far more efficient in how we meet the customer’s need, so those continue to feature in our objectives going forward,” Brooks said.

Published by The Jamaica Observer.