Cox Automotive will acquire DealerTrack Technologies, What is your opinion ?

dE members, How will this impact our industry ?

Good Morning dE members

Today ,Cox Enterprises announced a agreement under which Cox Automotive will acquire DealerTrack Technologies,Inc.

for $4 billion dollars. This will be the largest acquisition in Cox Enterprises history.

dE members, How will this effect our industry ?

What is the up side for dealerships ?

What concerns do you have if any ?

3 members like this

Comment

Comment by Frank J Lopes on June 15, 2015 at 2:32pm: Sandi hit it right on the head. A cash deal like this is going to empty the bank account and increase the pressure from the top down to recoup the investment quickly. As if Auto Trader wasn't expensive enough! But I'm not sure if the customer service at DDC can get any worse!

Comment by Sandi Jerome on June 15, 2015 at 1:48pm: I don't think there are any anti-trust issues since they are only acquiring one DMS company (the former Arkona DMS.) Even if they also bought up ADP and R+R, there are still lots of choices for dealers for CRM and DMS. Since DealerTrack didn't really have a CRM and this gives them VinSolutions which they needed.

Since the deal was financed, I don't see much capital available for all the child companies to spend on R&D to improve their products - instead they will probably find a lot of pressure from above to increase profits. For dealers, I expect to see the monthly expense increase and support to decrease as now all 3 majors (ADP, R+R, and DT) are in a crunch to produce profits and reduce expenses.

Comment by Darrin Smith on June 15, 2015 at 1:25pm: DT already had things in position for a complete online purchase process but now COX gets to add the wholesale side with Manheim and KBB adding another layer of control if they chose to. What will be interesting to watch is to see who wins in each of the solution sets. Does COX/ DT keep vAuto or Inventory + (AAX/ ecarlist)? do they keep Vin Solutions/ Haystack or Dealer.com? xTime or ASR/ Service Pro? Do they combine the field staff or will dealers be bombarded with 7 or 8 different product experts? Should be fun to watch...

Comment by William Simpson on June 15, 2015 at 1:14pm: Get nervous when they acquire RouteOne , just kidding, maybe. Strengthens their dominance in the vendor sector of automotive services. The difficult thing in our industry is to figure out the information overload that we are hit with by vendors and which services are a good ROI. This move could put them in a position to open a finance window for complete online purchasing process which may hurt our industry. It will happen eventually. Just my opinion.

Comment by Ken Luna on June 15, 2015 at 12:12pm: What will be interesting is how Cox marries all the components together. Historically, companies like ADP and Dominion have had varying degrees of success in similar scenarios.

Comment by Marcos Miranda on June 15, 2015 at 12:01pm: Frank, my thoughts exactly. Cox Automotive already owns Autotrader.com and Kelley Blue Book. With this additional acquisition they're putting themselves in a very "dominant position..."

Comment by tony rehn on June 15, 2015 at 11:35am: Narrows the road. We always fought with which side to go down ... Dealertrack or Cox
Just one less thing to worry about now huh?

Comment by Frank J Lopes on June 15, 2015 at 11:15am: Starting to feel as though Cox has control of too many services in our industry. Could see the possibility of them beginning to manipulate the dealer body towards their agenda (not saying that Cox necessarily HAS any agenda besides making money, but they would be obtaining more tools to do so).

This may be a silly question, but are there any anti-trust laws that would stand in the way of this acquisition?