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Friday, November 02, 2007
the Auto Retail Informer November 2, 2007
Auto Retail Informer Intro November 2, 2007
Automotive Aftermarket Industry week is drawing to a close. Next week I will begin to update you on everything I learned from meeting with a number of the industry's leaders. But today, I just wanted to give you a couple quick thoughts I had about Sonic and Asbury's conference calls. Specifically, I think Asbury's used vehicle woes could be due to a subprime vendor tightening standards (similar to what happened to CarMax when Drive tightened up its lending practices.) And therefore this problem will likely persist for the next 3 quarters. With Sonic, I really liked how management laid out a used vehicle strategy based on phases. There is no shortage of great technological solutions (in my opinion.) It is getting the culture to embrac
... To view the entire article: Asbury and Sonic 3Q07 Conference Call thoughts (11/02/07)
The not so good news about Asbury's results. The used problem is likely not going away anytime soon.Asbury's kind of first misstep in nearly three years really seems centered around the company's used business performance and heavy truck. With heavy truck, I give CEO Charles Oglesby a lot of credit for being very straightforward with the investment community. Charles said that based on conversations with analysts and industry participants, they made a strategic (I would call it tactical) bet that the heavy market was going to turn. It did not. And now they need to aggressively move to get their inventory in line. Every good management team will make tactical blunders every now and again. And I find it refreshing when I hear a man
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