Peter Simpson provides us with an insight into the automotive sales trading world – and beyond.
Inchape Retail sold
The big industry news this month is that another well-known British retail chain has been bought by an American company. This time it’s the retail arm of Inchape, which has 81 sites (and 3600 staff) in the UK, whose heritage includes brands such as Mann Egerton and H A Fox, and represents makes including Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Land-Rover, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, MINI, Porsche, smart, Toyota and Volkswagen.
Subject to regulatory approval, Inchape’s UK retail network is being sold, for £346million, to Group 1 Automotive UK, a wholly-owned subsidiary of American company Group 1 Automotive Inc. Group 1’s name is already familiar in the UK, having been here since 2007 and representing 15 brands at 55 dealerships. Assuming the deal is approved, Inchape shareholders look set to receive £100million of the proceeds via a share buyback within the next 12 months.
Though best-known to most in the UK for its retail operations, Inchape has in recent years developed a highly successful car distribution business which now operates in 40 countries worldwide. This is more profitable than retail sales, and the company have made a strategic decision to concentrate on distribution rather than sales to end-users. Inchape Chief Executive Duncan Tait, group chief executive of Inchcape, said that the strategic importance of the UK retail operations had become ‘limited’ and Board members therefore felt the time was right to ‘simplify’ the business and allow a new owner to take it forward.
This is a significant development on several levels; not least that Inchape is the third major dealership chain to pass into American hands in the past year, following Lookers and Pendragon. Clearly, the Americans see British car retailing as a business with a future. That’s interesting, considering the major changes that the industry is going through. Things, like the move towards electric power, the rise of online sales and the switch from dealer to agency model. It may be that the Americans feel better able to implement these changes.
Inchape and Group 1 will, I’m sure, be keen to see the new branding applied across the former Inchape network as soon as possible. Group 1 is a strong brand in the UK, and given that Inchape, as a business, is continuing, they will not want their name on something they no longer own or have control over.
Battery Bovver
Most traders are fairly regular users of ‘jump packs’ or similar external means of starting cars that have been standing a while, and therefore have slightly flat batteries. So long as there is some charge left, a pocket-sized lithium-type starter is all that’s needed to bring a car to life.
Sometimes, though, a car that’s been started in this way will display a short-term ‘
