Motor Trader The award-winning and longest running UK magazine for car retailing professionals. Your first stop for News, Jobs and Reports for the motor industry.
Automotive software and dealer management systems (DMS) specialist Pinewood Technologies turned in H1 underlying pre-tax profits down -13% to £4m on turnover up 11% to £16.1m. Gross profit rose 12.4% to £14.5m.
Pinewood used to belong to dealer group Pendragon. In February Pendragon sold its dealerships to US dealer group Lithia for £367m, but retained Pinewood, which remained listed on the stock exchange as a pure play software business. Lithia also struck a deal with Pinewood to use DMS in selected dealerships.
In H1 Pinewood’s user numbers grew 3.6% to 34,300, driven driven by new Lithia UK users.
European operations delivered the lion’s share of revenues (£15.4m) of revenues followed by Africa (£400,000) and Asia (£300,000). But Pinewood is eyeing the US market. The group has a strategic partnership with Lithia, which has seen it invest £10m in a North American joint venture, to roll out its systems at Lythia dealerships and target the wider US market.
In September 2024, Pinewood invested US$4.2m in an automotive AI company Seez, which provides AI chatbots for car dealers as well as a suite of e-commerce and omnichannel products.
Bill Berman, CEO of Pinewood Technologies Group, said: “Pinewood had a great first half of the year, with impressive double-digit growth in both revenue and gross profit, and we have also made good progress in expanding our customer base. During the period we have prioritised rolling out our system to the UK dealerships of our strategic partner Lithia Motors which has been very successful.”
Pinewood said the biggest risks to the company were failure to deliver or maintain robust cyber security credentials and to protect its software assets from security threats. It said its risk control group had met to assess the risks and the board had recently reviewed the risk factors.