Overview

Our commitment to our customers is to supply high-quality, relevant and innovative products and services at competitive prices, and deliver outstanding customer service. Our people and strong stakeholder relationships are critical in ensuring that we deliver on this commitment.

Our long-standing importer and retail partnerships with leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) enables us to represent some of the world's most recognisable brands. We provide these partners with a highly effective route-to-market and have a deep understanding of their strategies, customer preferences and mobility-related technologies. Our ability to meet OEM sales and customer service targets and engage with OEMs on what consumers in our markets want, as well as our strategically located dealership network, position us as an OEM partner of choice.

Excelling in the sale of new vehicles generates a car parc, which in turn builds a book of future business. This parc provides us with the opportunity to maximise future income from each vehicle in the parc; in its maintenance and servicing within the warranty period followed by the servicing and provision of aftermarket parts when it moves out of warranty. Our relationships with our customers therefore go beyond the sale of a vehicle to having multiple touchpoints with them throughout their vehicle ownership cycle, engendering customer loyalty. This further supports our other business activities such as vehicle rentals, value-added products and services (VAPS), and the provision of automotive parts and accessories.

Our expertise in procuring the right vehicles for the market as well as the breadth of our offering enables us to meet customers' mobility needs at all points of their vehicle ownership cycle. This is evidenced by our growing market share in South Africa, and a car parc of over 750 000 for our Importer brands.

Changing customer behaviour

Accelerated by COVID-19, customers have become far more comfortable with digital engagement in the past two years, particularly when searching for their ideal vehicle or engaging with businesses for aftersales service and support. Today, functionality exists for customers to use their preferred device to search for and find information on a variety of vehicles at their own convenience (anywhere, anytime). In addition, there is a growing expectation that engagement and services are personalised, seamless, quick and easy.

The physical dealership remains an integral part of the vehicle purchasing journey. Customers still prefer to physically view a vehicle, test drive it and complete the last mile of the transaction in the dealership environment. However, when customers visit our dealerships today, they are generally already well informed, and many have already decided which vehicle they want to purchase. Our dealerships must therefore transition to centres of experience, where our customer-facing employees foster trust, leverage technology to enhance the customer experience and are highly skilled to engage across multiple channels and meet our customers wherever they are.

COVID-19 has also highlighted the need for more flexible, affordable and accessible mobility solutions such as the shared ownership model (popular internationally), and usage/subscription-based offerings, accessible to customers through digital and physical channels. As the catalyst for thinking about the disruptors to our traditional business model, Mobility Solutions participates in pilots and small ventures that experiment with trends and test the market and customer uptake. Our many customer touchpoints give us the opportunity to test a number of different solutions.

Another change in customer behaviour, particularly seen in South Africa and Eastern Europe where vehicle replacement cycles are lengthening, is the increasing demand for alternative and cheaper accessories and parts. Aftermarket Parts' growing footprint and our international distribution centres enable us to leverage our buying power to distribute and sell competitively priced products.

The future car parc of our importer brands will comprise connected vehicles, able to communicate with one another and the infrastructure around them. This technology can improve traffic efficiency, reduce collisions and enable behaviour-based offerings as well as deliver over-the-air software updates and emergency services response. Our strategy is to position ourselves as the provider of choice for these vehicles and the products and services that will become available due to connected technology. Connected vehicles will generate more data, which will need to be managed better to effectively monetise it.

The impact of digitisation will continue to intensify, and rapidly so. Shared mobility solutions, such as ride-sharing, vehicle subscription and e-hailing are becoming more common and attractive alternatives to traditional vehicle ownership. However, South Africa is a slow adopter of these models. We will continue to monitor the trends emerging in the technology landscape to dynamically respond to opportunities as we seek to improve people's lives by envisioning, innovating and creating new avenues of access to leading edge mobility solutions.