9:30 am, December 31, 2025
The ultimate owner of We Buy Any Car and the auction house BCA chalked up a £112.9m loss before tax in 2025.
Accounts for Constellation Automotive Holdings – the TDR Capital-backed business – to the end of March 2025 show revenues increased £106m to £9.5bn.
Adjusted EBITDA profit in the annual report show the firm made £360.5m on paper, but when depreciation, restructuring costs, amortisation and punishing financing costs are included, its earnings plummet.
The heavily leveraged group paid £210.4m in financing costs during the year as well as a £23.6m one-off finance fee which dramatically hit its numbers.
Loss before income tax rose 51% with £112.9m chalked up in the accounts. The year before, the group lost £74.4m before tax.
Constellation Automotive Holdings is the ultimate parent company of the franchised car dealer group Marshalls, the used car dealership Cinch, the car buying firm We Buy Any Car and the auction house BCA.
The private equity backed firm has a complicated web of companies interwoven to create, what it claims, is the ‘largest vertically integrated digital car marketplace in Europe’.
The report for the holding company reveals the vast differences in performance for the separate elements of the group.
BCA, We Buy Any Car and its automotive services businesses, which include transport and partner finance, are wrapped up under the Constellation Automotive Ltd business.
Cinch, which publishes its own accounts, and Marshall Motor Group, are now held under the Constellation Retail Group Ltd, run by former Mercedes Benz UK boss Gary Savage.
All of these businesses are ultimately controlled by Constellation Automotive Holdings.
Picking through accounts for its subsidiaries reveals BCA generated EBITDA profits of £152m during the year after increasing fees and ‘rightsizing the business’. This figure was up 33% on the year before.
We Buy Any Car bought a staggering 512,000 cars during the year – up from 478,000 in 2024 – with these vehicles funnelled back through the group’s auction and retail businesses. It added £61.5m of EBITDA profits to the total – also up nearly a third on the year before.
However, separate accounts for Cinch showed it clocked up a pre-tax £100m loss, while the parent company of Marshall Motor Group booked a £23.7m loss. Marshall profits halved during the year, down from £22.2m in 2024 to £11.2m in 2025.
In April 2025, the Constellation holding company received £548m of new investment from shareholders which, the firm says, ‘addressed its high leverage’.
Constellation added: ‘The business model is reliant on volume and has demonstrable ability to deliver strong financial results.
‘The group remains the market leader and has the capacity to perform well with rising volumes.
‘Given modest growth forecast for the new car market, the business has been right-sized for the current conditions and will continue to deliver good EBITDA and cash generation in an environment of stable activity and pricing.’
The accounts also show the firm realised £96.8m from the sale of its shares in Lookers, the former listed car dealer. It also owns 10.1% of car dealer group Vertu.
