Monday, November 09, 2009
Arnold Clark to buy dealerships from GK Group
Agreed terms
Terms have been agreed in principle for the sales of businesses in Carlisle, Penrith, Workington and Dumfries.
GK Group is selling Ford and Citroen franchises in Carlisle, Penrith and Workington, Ford Citroen and Peugeot in Dumfries and Ford in Carlisle.
GK Group is ranked 35 in the Motor Trader Top 200 dealers. It turned in losses of £4m on turnover of £214.5m for the year to December 2008.
Other businesses
The group also has other dealerships in Alfreton, Chesterfield, Derby, Holmewood, Mansfield, Retford, Sheffield, Stranraer and Worksop.
Arnold Clark is ranked number 4 in the Motor Trader Top 200 dealers with annual turnover of £2.2bn.
The company announced in August it was creating 700 new jobs in sites across the North of England and Scotland.
The Scottish motor dealer, which runs Europe's largest independently run network, wants to create 500 sales jobs, 120 modern apprenticeship places and 80 support roles.
It has a huge used car business with 120,000 sales per annum and its website is the most popular dealer website in the UK, according to the latest traffic figures from Hitwise/Experian.
DATED: 09.11.09
FEED: MT
GM should fix Opel without state help, VW CEO says
Winterkorn said General Motors was right to keep Opel but the U.S. automaker should now fix the money-losing unit without state help.
Some of VW group's brands don't operate as well he would like but he would never go begging for state aid, Winterkorn said.
"When things are bad, it's the parent company's task to help the daughter company," he said.
Winterkorn didn't name VW's troubled brands but one that he might have been thinking is the group's Spanish unit Seat, which VW had kept despite the unit's large losses in recent years.
He made the remarks as he sat next to Carl-Peter Forster, Opel's former chairman, during a podium discussion at the award ceremony, which is organized by the mass-circulation newspaper Bild am Sonntag.
GM's European operations are heading for a 2.4 billion euro pre-tax loss this year and the carmaker is looking for European governments to help finance a 3 billion-euro reorganization.
After reporting a 1.5 billion euro operating profit for the first nine months, VW is unlikely to be begging for state aid anytime soon.
But if it needs to it can count on its home state of Lower Saxony, which owns a stake of 20 percent VW, to champion its cause.
