2:00 pm, October 17, 2013
MORE than 70 new dealerships have been added to Britain’s Hyundai network over the last three years.
The expanding company now has 160 outlets across the UK, up from 140 three years ago. And within that expansion there have been quite a few arrivals and departures, with a total of 53 changes since 2010.
It might sound like there’s been a fair amount of upheaval but Hyundai’s UK president and CEO Tony Whitehorn says the changes have all been made by having an open, transparent dialogue with everyone concerned.
He also said that the three-year transition period was now almost at an end, with only a couple of significant open points remaining – south London and Luton, Bedfordshire. And he added it was a process the company had to go through because of its expanding customer base and model range.
Looking back to 2010, Whitehorn exclusively told Car Dealer: ‘We presented to our partners and explained the direction we were going in. We said that for some of them it would require a big investment.
‘We also said, ”we can show you what that investment would leverage and what it will bring you – do you want to come with us or not?”
‘In some cases we said, ”Actually you’ve got a very small facility. You’re selling 150 cars [a year], you need to be selling 300. You can’t sell that out of here. So what are we going to do about it?”
‘They might have said they were going to build a bigger place. Fantastic! We were then able to move on and discuss management structures and so on.
‘But if they didn’t want to, that wasn’t suitable for us going forward so we had to be honest. We had to look at the possibility of putting someone in alongside them in the same territory or perhaps they might have been happy to leave us and work with another franchise.
‘From our point of view it’s very important to be transparent with the network. The key is working with the dealers so that they appreciate what is best for them. To try and work through business in an open way is really the only way to do it. We are not a hire and fire company.’
