Automotive distributor Louis Industrial, LIG, is making a big push to further its Jamaican and regional business. The supplier of lubricants has announced a new partnership with the Orlen Group as sole distributor of its premium lubricants line.
This means that as of October 2024, Jamaican and some regional customers have access to Orlen lubricants with the much sought-after European formulations and hard-to-get and expensive viscosities, such as 0w20, 5w30, 10w30 and 10w40, which are specific to many modern, European, high-performance and hybrid motor cars.
Louis Industrial is a distributor of heavy-duty automotive and industrial parts in Jamaica and the Caribbean, with more than 32,000 stock items from over 200 global brands in its portfolio. It trades in brands such as Wix Filters, Monroe Shocks, FP Diesel, Dayton Parts, among others. Additionally, LIG already supplies other lubricant brands to the market, including Total Energies Lubricants and Chevron.
“We started supplying every single retailer out there, anyone out there; once it’s heavy-duty it is supplied by us. We supply spares to every outlet across the island. That has become our forte in distribution,” said Louis Industrial Managing Director Dean Francis.
But as it relates to growth opportunities over the past decade: “We’ve been looking at opportunities like the partnership with Orlen and moving on them,” he added.
Orlen SA is a Polish multinational oil refiner, petrol retailer and natural gas trader headquartered in Płock, Poland. It also operates in Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Pakistan, and Slovakia. Valued at about US$14 billion, its largest shareholder is the Polish state with 49.9 per cent of the shares.
Francis said Louis Industrial actively courted the Polish company for over a year to land the exclusive lubricants distribution deal. In striking the deal with Orlen, LIG have made significant investments in inventory.
“The products have been here over the past two months, and they have been moving extremely well ... so I’m now pressuring our suppliers to keep up,” said Francis.
“We are proud to say, the work we did and the confidence we had was proven,” he said. Louis Industrial traces its roots back to 1966 when founder Louis Francis established a small repair shop on Spanish Town Road near Six Miles in Kingston. Known initially as Louis Industrial Garage, the company quickly became the go-to place for trucks and heavy-duty equipment repairs. It also did extensive training of staff.
Francis said by the late-1980s, the depth of training offered came back to haunt the company as, after six months of instruction, the programme participants would stop showing up for work. They were utilising the skills learnt to offer informal repair services for trucks that would normally have been repaired at LIG.
“He (Louis Francis) realised that the writing was on the wall; that yes, things were changing in the labour force, and he chose not to be a part of that downturn. So he decided to close,” the current MD said.
Having made that decision, the founder encouraged all the mechanics to open their own facilities, while he switched to supplying auto parts and consultations, said Francis. Today, LIG still has Louis Francis as the titular head of the company, but son Dean has been running the business, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, when Louis went into retirement. Grandsons Matthew, who is trained up to undergrad level in management information systems, and David, who is finishing up his undergrad training in management, are being groomed to take over the company at some point in the near future, Francis said.
Matthew Francis says with the expansion into domestic auto parts and lubes distribution, the company has doubled its workforce, moving from around 45 to 50 permanent employees to 93 at present. “We’re currently on quite a bit of a recruitment drive that is leading into all of these new products. We can talk about oil and big brands like Orlen and Lucas Oil amongst many of the others that we’ve been appointed distributors for in Jamaica and other countries; we have to step up our game,” said Matthew.
In addition to Louis Industrial’s Jamaican operations, the company does business with Cayman Islands, Antigua & Barbuda, St Kitts-Nevis, and St Lucia, and is working on entering Barbados.“We’re also doing business with Costa Rica as well, which is one of our first Latin American entrants,” Matthew said. “When you go to Cayman or you may go to St Kitts or Antigua, they don’t have that luxury that we have. The market there cannot take container loads of lubricants, for example, So, in finding our value and bringing value, we work with logistics to get lubricants to them in a feasible way. So, it’s not about shipping containers, it’s about shipping pallets, in many cases, of lubricants,” Dean Francis added.
Story By: Neville Graham (Business Reporter)