Lithia Motors Inc., which has been on a dealership buying spree and kickstarted the parade of megadeals in 2021, is not done shopping this year as it climbs towards its eventual goal of 500 U.S. stores.
After a busy third quarter in which Lithia’s combined dealerships acquisitions — with purchases in Alabama, California, Texas, Georgia and international expansion via Canada’s Pfaff Automotive Partners — are expected to generate annual revenue of $1.7 billion, the retailer has deals worth nearly the same amount expected to close in the fourth quarter.
“While several large deals were announced recently, the automotive retail industry remains highly fragmented and unconsolidated with the market share of the 10 largest groups at only about 10 percent,” Lithia CEO Bryan DeBoer said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call last week. “We have nearly $1.5 billion in annual revenue commitments as well as over $12 billion in the pipeline, which excludes our peers’ large transactions.”
Tom Dobry, Lithia’s vice president of marketing, said the group expects the deals tallying a projected $1.5 billion in annual revenue to close before the end of 2021, pending manufacturer approvals.
As of last week, Lithia said it had acquired stores representing $6.2 billion in annualized revenue through acquisitions in 2021.
Lithia posted $307.9 million in third-quarter net income, nearly doubling the $158.8 million it earned a year earlier. Lithia had 209 U.S. dealerships in 2020, but following the ongoing acquisition tear, the group’s current store count is 265. Revenue for the Medford, Ore., retailer climbed 70 percent to $6.17 billion.
“We ended the quarter with $1.7 billion in cash and available credit, which if deployed to support network growth, could purchase up to $6.8 billion in annualized revenues,” CFO Tina Miller said during the earnings call.
Lithia was the first of the publicly traded retailers to make a megadeal splash this year when it bought Michigan’s Suburban Collection of 34 dealerships. Last month, Group 1 Automotive Inc., Sonic Automotive Inc. and Asbury Automotive Group Inc. each revealed plans for megadeals of their own.
DeBoer said Lithia was active on at least two of those deals, without specifying which ones, but noted his group wasn’t as aggressive because “we didn’t believe that the network strategy was as good for us as maybe it was for one of our peers.”
Beyond Lithia’s plans to continue growing its U.S. dealership footprint, DeBoer said the company is considering expanding beyond passenger vehicles into other industries with a similar business model of new sales, used sales, service and parts.
“We believe that there’s opportunities to overlay our digital e-commerce strategies ,as well as our underlying network strategy, into two-wheel mobility, into tractor-trailer mobility and into farming mobility,” DeBoer said. “So as we begin to grow domestically, that’s where you would have the same type of disciplines that are in automotive retail, which is the most proactive in terms of customer desirability, [and] could be overlaid into those three other industries at some point as well.”