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Holden to regain number one spot: Dorizas
New MD has a six-year plan to take Holden back to the standing of Australia's favourite brandThe closure of Holden's production plants in 2017 won't diminish the GM subsidiary's sales aspirations for long, says newly installed managing director, Gerry Dorizas.
In fact, Dorizas has an ambitious plan for his new charge to top the sales charts within three years of the end of local manufacturing.
During an official media function last night, Dorizas was unequivocal.
"The point [where] we want to go is back to number one," he told local journalists, before submitting this was a goal for 2020. By implication that means overtaking Toyota and holding Mazda at bay (and possibly Hyundai too, in the period between plant closures and 2020). Dorizas doesn't see that as an impossible challenge. He believes that Toyota's market share will slip back considerably once the Altona plant closes (also in 2017, just like Holden).
Since the GFC and the Japanese tsunami in 2011, Toyota's Australian market share has been slipping anyway – from a high of 23.6 per cent in 2008 to a low of 18 per cent in 2011. Although the share revived to 19 per cent last year, the long-term trend since 2007 appears to be downwards with sales last year over 24,000 fewer than in 2008.
Holden sees that trend continuing and even accelerating in the post manufacturing phase. If the GM brand can raise its market share – through a new product strategy and a re-focused dealer network – it can build up share as Toyota's is in decline and overtake the current market leader.
"I believe it will be 15 per cent our brand, 14 per cent the other," Dorizas indicated. To put that in perspective, and presuming the market will hover around a million sales a year through to 2020, Toyota would have to shed roughly five per cent market share (around 20,000 sales per annum). There are precedents for that, but for Holden (less than 10 per cent share in 2013) to pick up a similar number of sales lost by Toyota would require Hyundai and Mazda – and every other growing import brand – to sit on their hands. Hyundai's market share last year was 8.5 per cent and Mazda's was 9.1.
For Holden to claw back so many sales in such a relatively short space of time – and after the brand-wounding exercise of plant closures – would call for dramatic changes to the company's product portfolio, marketing and sales.
Dorizas is convinced Holden needs to "redefine the brand" and "make it more modern." He also acknowledges that the company's products are in need of a shake-up, although he would not reveal what form that might take. An official announcement will be forthcoming over the next few months, he advised. But attracting more buyers (and a younger audience) remains the major sticking point that must be overcome.
"We want to be customer-oriented," Dorizas said, explaining that customer satisfaction is currently a challenge for the company.
"We have to get out customers back," he continued. Key to that lies with the Holden dealer network, which is tipped in some quarters to shrink markedly in the post-manufacturing era. Dorizas sees the dealer network's current size and national coverage as strengths that can be well and truly exploited even after manufacturing dies.
"If the dealers are satisfied, if they are profitable, they tend to invest in people," he said. Clearly, growing sales at dealer level when the dealer network is already very large could have a geometric effect on total sales for the brand.
"Dealers do not take care of their customers," he forthrightly noted, "Retention is very low."
Yet Dorizas does feel that the existing dealer network is staffed by "passionate" people, it's just that their methods are conventional industry practices that have become entrenched over time. Dorizas doesn't see, for example, why dealers should work so hard to be mates with their customers and set out to drag buyers back to the dealership (for servicing, to use one example) when clearly the owners don't want to do that. To the owner, bringing a car in for a service is a chore – and it always will be. And this sort of strategy hasn't been paying dividends for Holden anyway, given the low rate of retention to which Dorizas refers.
The new MD sounds like a man on a mission. He is unusual in being a head of Holden selected from outside the GM world, and his background (sales and marketing with Fiat/Alfa and VW) involves no exposure to manufacturing. Dorizas is not a particularly young man, and his career trajectory doesn't look like a fast-track race to the top of GM – with Holden a training-ground stepping stone along the way.
Whether that's a good thing for Holden in the longer term – and whether Dorizas can bring to fruition his new ideas – will no doubt become clearer about six years from now.
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Written byKen Gratton
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Please see our Editorial Guidelines & Code of Ethics (including for more information about sponsored content and paid events). The information published on this website is of a general nature only and doesn’t consider your particular circumstances or needs.
If the price does not contain the notation that it is "Drive Away", the price may not include additional costs, such as stamp duty and other government charges.
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