SOS acquires another Collins Green Avenue property
Published:Wednesday | November 11, 2020 | 12:07 AMKarena Bennett/Business Reporter
Stationery and Office Supplies Limited, SOS, has acquired another property in Kingston for $15 million.
The quarter-acre property at 36 Collins Green Avenue sits adjacent to lands the company bought at 34 Collins Green Avenue back in 2017. Both locations will open up to the back of SOS’s head office, which is located at 21-25 Beechwood Avenue. SOS has spent a total of $76 million on the property acquisitions over the past three years.
“The possibility of having all the properties adjoined was important to us. We were always on the lookout for available properties around us, and this one was empty for a couple of years,” said Deputy Managing Director Allan McDaniel. “Eventually we found the owner and after talking, we found out that he was trying to get it sold,” he told the Financial Gleaner.
FACILITATE GROWTH
The property was officially acquired in September and will be incorporated into SOS’s operations during 2021, but the office supply company says it is still to determine the precise use to which it would be put.
“This property is not a need right now, but is an opportunity to continue the growth that we have been experiencing, and it will be here when we start to do whatever is it that we want to do next, whether it be more warehousing or diversification from the office supplies business that we are currently in,” McDaniel said.
SOS, just two months ago, settled into its newly developed space at 34 Collins Green Avenue. The property now doubles as a warehouse and showroom space for the office supplies company’s newest line of heavy-duty racks, which goes up to 36 feet and is able to hold up to 5,000 pounds of goods.
The items are mainly used in the car parts business, food processing and hotel industries for more efficient use of floor space, and add to SOS’s previous line of lightweight industrial racks.
McDaniel has hinted at plans for further expansion, which the property acquisition would facilitate, but not the timeline.
The company has ground to make up that has been lost to the pandemic. The SOS stock has been trading flat at around $$4.55 in the run-up to the release of its September earnings report.
June was a bad period for the office supplies company, which spun from a profit of $34 million to a loss of $22 million, after revenue cratered 54 per cent to $135 million.