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Kia fleet boss: "We're acting like a fleet manufacturer now"

Date: 08 August 2012   |   Author: Jack Carfrae

Kia UK's fleet boss, John Hargreaves, has claimed that the firm is now operating as a fully-fledged fleet manufacturer following its rapid growth in the UK marketplace.

Speaking exclusively to BusinessCar, he said: "It's more a case now of we are doing what everyone else is in that we're attacking the segments. We're acting like a fleet manufacturer now.

"We've got 3.1% of the current market share in fleet. This time last year it was around 2% and for the full year it was 2.5% last year."

Part of the expansion is down to large public sector contracts, such as supplying Ceed SWs to the Environment Agency and the MoD. It also gained ground with major blue-chip companies where employees had "moved out of Mondeos and into Sportages".

Addressing the product expansion, Hargreaves said there was still more to come, including a new MPV: "There's the Ceed SW, the Sorento and a new people carrier in the spring of next year, and then the Cee'd three-door.

"The job is to build up the acceptance of the brand in general, and in fleet our job is to get ourselves considered by people who have a choice of car. They will have traditionally defaulted to the German badges or Ford.

"The MPV will be approximately next spring. It's effectively replacing the Carens but is also a partial replacement for the Sedona. Instead of having two MPVs we will have one, which will be between the two in terms of size."

A spokesperson for Kia UK confirmed that the MPV will be called the Carens and that it will be available as both a five- and a seven-seater.

Hargreaves did not rule out the prospect of an estate version of the upper medium Optima, but said that there would not be one this year.

He also mentioned that the firm is in the process of recruiting for the role to manage fleet aftersales, and is planning to expand its fleet team in the long-run and its fleet specialist dealer network: "We intend to put resource into fleet aftersales and we've just decided to recruit someone specifically to handle [that] so we can offer a standardised service to the fleet customer.

"That will probably lead to a set of dealer standards as well. There's every chance of an expansion [of the fleet team] next year. We will continue to expand on the 20-strong fleet dealer network. In the short term we'd like another five, perhaps moving to a maximum of around 30."

Hargreaves claimed that there was still work to be done on RVs for some products but that he is expecting an improvement when all cars with the seven-year warranty filter onto the used market: "On almost all products, our RVs are good when measured against the basket of competition but there is continual work to be done. There are one or two cars we think should be higher.

"The other thing is that by the time we get to January 2013, any three-year-old Kia will have four years of manufacturer warranty remaining. There used to be variable warranty levels and the seven-year warranty hasn't had its maximum impact on RVs yet."

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