The businessman plans to buy a dealer in Baia Mare and avoid reliance on a single segment of the auto market.
“We want to expand by adding other brands. We plan to buy an auto center in Baia Mare and are constantly looking at the market to see what opportunities we have to add more brands to our portfolio,” Michael Schmidt said.
“We will see what brand we will open in Baia Mare early next year. BMW is out of the question. We would like a volume brand.”
He says the ‘secret’ to the auto business is to sell a greater number of brands, to cover as much of the market as possible, and to have bargaining power with the manufacturers.
“If I were to start a business from scratch now, I would go multi-brand, but one has to be big for carmakers to agree to a deal with several premium brands. The Tiriac group did it because it could afford to financially. Back in 1994, our business model was Spartan, because we were just beginning.”
The businessman also wants to get into the hospitality industry next year by building hotels on plots he had previously earmarked for expansion of the truck dealerships.
“We have seven plots we bought in 2007-2008 to expand the truck dealer network in Oradea, Craiova and Sibiu across the street from the airport, Constanta, in Otopeni (near Bucharest) and are looking into creating a four-star hotel chain. In Bucharest, for instance, many hotels are full and there is demand, especially close to the airport.”
His hotels might be affiliated to brands like Holiday Inn or Hilton Double Tree.
Automobile Bavaria group expects revenue to reach EUR360 million in 2016, up from EUR310 million in 2015.
Most of the revenue comes from the Schmidt Gruppe Deutschland – five BMW dealers in Germany, around Munich, along with the Rolls-Royce center, which will see EUR140 million sales this year. Second most important are the BMW dealers of Automobile Bavaria in Romania, estimated to generate EUR120 million sales in 2016, followed by MHS Truck&Bus, the importer of the MAN trucks in Romania, EUR100 million.
Automobile Bavaria was the importer of BMW in Romania until 2007, when BMW Group Romania took over the import operations, as the carmaker decided for a direct presence in the country. The group is now BMW’s biggest dealer in Romania.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)