INTERVIEW
‘To be in football and then high-end luxury cars is a dream job’ H.R. Owen chief executive Ken Choo talks to James Batchelor about life at the head of the dealer group loved by the rich and famous.
Proposed design for the Bentley Surrey showroom
H.R. OWEN Position: 2019 turnover: 2019 EBITDA: ROS:
17th £532m £13.7m 1.5%
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ocked-down buyers know what they’re getting when they ‘click’ to buy a new Ford Fiesta. Let’s face it, a Fiesta is a Fiesta and it’ll be no more complicated to get familiar with than a new kettle, but for the supercar buyer lockdown car purchasing must be next to impossible. Surely a Ferrari customer wants to test-drive the new SF90 Stradale first? Play with every feature it comes with and prod every body panel before taking delivery? ‘Some Lexus and Volkswagen dealers tell me they have customers who are spending £30,000 on a brand-new car and they want to test-drive it first – can you imagine a Lamborghini Sian customer asking the same thing?’ says Ken Choo, chief executive of H.R. Owen – the dealer group loved by the rich and famous. ‘None of the customers of the new Ferrari SF90 or the Monza SP1 or SP2 have tested the cars – none of them,’ Choo chuckles. ‘We have studied the figures and 90 per cent of our customers do not test drive – before the pandemic it was around 50/50. Why? Because they know the product is good. If you ask for a test drive of a Ferrari SP1, Ferrari ask “What is there to test drive? What’s wrong with it? Don’t you like it?”’ ‘The fantastic part of all this is that you might expect customers to say “Business is bad at the moment so I’m not picking up my new Sian or my SF90” but it’s not true. I haven’t had a single drop-off on cars worth £1.6m and above – not one.’ Choo admits that lower down the pecking order of supercars there have been some cancellations, and the new car order bank in 2020 was down by 25 per cent compared with the year before. However, in general, the rich are still buying cars regardless and in readiness for a happier, more normal-feeling summer this year. While new car sales understandably slipped in 2020, used cars remained consistently high for the dealer group. ‘When people can’t buy new they turn to used cars and this pushes up prices,’ says Choo. ‘One-year-old Lamborghini Uruses are selling for a £5,000-to£10,000 premium at the moment, but the used market has a bandwidth. If you look at cars above £150,000 to £160,000 it starts to get tough, but cars around £100,000 to £150,000 are selling really well. We can’t get hold of some cars because nobody is selling.’ 2020 will go down as a year of false starts and sudden lockdowns, and for H.R. Owen it was a painful one. It recorded £1.9m profit before tax to the end of June 2020 – down from £8.2m the previous year – and revenue declined from £532m to £389m. It should be said, too, that the 2019 figures were over a 14-month period. The firm had to cut 20 per cent of its workforce, too, and relied heavily on furlough, with around 90 per cent of staff on the scheme in the first lockdown – but there were some high points. ‘In June, July, August 2020 we had the most fantastic months ever in the history of the company,’ says Choo. ‘We’ve never seen so many people coming back to buy. And the reason is people had the fear factor. A lot of customers are saying, “You know, tomorrow I could leave the world and I have £100m or £200m and I’m not enjoying life – what the heck, I’ll just buy a bloody brand-new Ferrari and drive it!’
