Six new dealerships for Mazda

AFTER a prolonged period of plateaued dealer network activity, Mazda is opening the throttles on its national network, with six new outlets due to open their doors around the country within the next 12 months.

Over the last 15 years, the Japanese car-maker's share of the Australian market has grown at a steady pace, but despite the increased presence, local infrastructure and retail footprint has not expanded at the same rate.

With the company on course for a record-breaking 110,000 sales this year, Mazda will finally start adding to its network, with more vehicle storage compounds and dealerships springing up from the next few weeks onwards and into 2016.

Speaking at the launch of Mazda's all new fourth-generation MX-5 sportscar, Mazda Australia managing director Martin Benders said its current network of dealers had been working hard to get the brand where it was today, but new premises were now necessary to spread mounting pressure.

“We've grown from around 25,000 around the year 2000 to one hundred and something thousand this year, and we did that without adding any dealers,” he said, “but at the 100,000 mark the dealers have more throughput in private business than Toyota dealer does with all their fleet business.”“When the dealers grew they became super efficient, so they got their sales people from selling 12 a month to 20 a month. They took all non-retail business off-site and everything that happens at the dealership is just retail – but even then, they are going flat out.

“If you push them too hard then the customer side of it deteriorates because you don't have the time to do the delivery properly.”

Left: Mazda Australia managing director Martin Benders

Australia will get a fairly even spread of the new dealerships with one each for Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide and Perth, while Melbourne will be treated to two new outlets, filling gaps in the brand's localised presence.

“We have done a representation study and we identified six spots around the capital cities where there is population growth and all the other brands are represented and we are not getting our national share,” said Mr Benders.

“Adding those six across the country starts to add a bit of capacity without putting pressure on the existing dealers, but even when we add those six dealers we are still going to have a smaller network than most of the top ten brands.”

According to Mr Benders, one of the Melbourne locations in the outer suburb of Caroline Springs and the Perth site would be “trading in the next couple of weeks” and all new locations will be on green-field sites.

While the company has selected five out of the six new dealerships to be operated by existing Mazda partners, one will be a new face to the franchise.

“Five out of the six have existing Mazda dealers involved in the business,” he said. The only one that is new is in Perth, because three out of our five dealers there are already with one group and one of the groups bought a fourth, so we didn't want to give him any more. So we had to go with somebody new.”

Mr Benders said he was pleased with how the network of dealers had built the brand so rapidly over the years and the company was responding by continuing investment to boost efficiency and capacity around the country.

“We have done a bit of work on our side as well, because the dealers have invested bucketloads of money across the country building up their capacity, so we have done new vehicle storage compounds in Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney,” he said.

In addition to the new storage facilities, Mazda is also refreshing its management hubs around the country, including a new Mazda national headquarters on Wellington Road.

“We've got new offices in Brisbane, Sydney, South Australia and Western Australia, and we'll have the new headquarters coming on-stream next year,” said Mr Benders.