Phillips doubles up

MITSUBISHI Motors Australia boss Tom Phillips will take over the role of recently departed sales and marketing executive director Bill Pike for at least the next three months.

Mr Phillips says he will not seek an immedi-ate replacement for Mr Pike because he wants to work more closely with the Australian Mitsubishi dealer body.

“I am not doing this other job because I think I can do it better than anyone else, I just really want to get a grasp of what the issues are,” Mr Phillips said. “Whether I do it three, six or nine months – I don’t know.” Mr Pike was hired into Mitsubishi by Mr Phillips in early 2002 from Toyota Australia, where he was divisional general manager export and logistics.

Mr Phillips was also a former Toyota Australia executive.

Dealers have told GoAuto that there had been “a falling out” between Mr Pike and the dealer body – particularly in the Sydney market.

There are also indications that relations between Mr Phillips and Mr Pike had become strained around the office in recent times with signs of fric-tion and disagreement surfacing at a press function last year.

Mr Pike’s departure is one of a number of public upheavals that have hit MMAL early in a tough new year, which has also seen: * The company slump to sixth behind importers Nissan and Mazda in local sales charts on the basis of January 2004 figures.

* Magna/Verada TL/KL sales figures barely reach 1000 in January, with both Lancer and Mirage also well off the pace.

* Export Diamante (Magna) sales fail to break 10,000 in the US in 2003.

*An advertising agency review announced.

Mr Phillips conducted a whistlestop tour of dealers last week to work through issues and quell the unrest, which has at least in part been prompted by the fall in Mitsubishi’s sales share from 8.5 per cent in January 2003 to 5.9 per cent 12 months later.

Dealers have been given a direct line through to Mr Phillips.

“Things aren’t easy but I would say we have pretty good support,” Mr Phillips told GoAuto.

“It is not without a lot of pain and there are still a lot of issues on the table.

“Not all of these things always come back to dealer profitability and product range … some things you can fix and some things you can’t.” MMAL has a long wait in front of it until the all-new Magna replacement goes on sale here in the second half of 2005, and its long wheel-base US- export spin-off starts production in 2006.

It has already downgraded TL/KL sales aspirations from the 30,000 per annum announced at last year’s launch to around 22,000 per annum.

It also has a Magna re-spec planned for the short term to give the veteran car a kick along. The current generation Magna was launched in 1996 and is the oldest of the big four’s locally manufactured offerings – in terms of local market on-sale.

But MMAL is not pursuing rental fleet sales for Magna. This was an area of the market that had been pursued previously and helped hold sales up.

“Our aspiration is not to be number one in the market, but we think we can do better in some areas like Lancer and Pajero – we think there are opportunities there,” Mr Phillips said.

Meanwhile, Mr Phillips emphatically denied a rumour that MMAL’s marketing department is about to be shifted to Sydney. It is a move that Mr Phillips has considered previously but ruled out on expense grounds.