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Kia plans to introduce fleet service plan in 2013

Date: 18 October 2012   |   Author: Tristan Young

Kia is looking to further improve its fleet offering with a service plan in 2013, according to UK managing director Michael Cole.

"It should go live at some point next year. We're currently recruiting a person to do this," he said.

Speaking to BusinessCar at the Paris motor show, Cole said he was aiming to keep the fleet and retail mix for the brand at near 50:50, with fleet just behind retail.

"We like to keep a balanced mix with fleet sales to Motability, daily rental and user choosers," he said.

"We're seeing good growth in fleet. We're trying to keep our daily rental mix to 10%. It works for us at 10% as it provides a good source of cars for our approved used, which is for cars up to 18 months old.

"We don't go for older cars because we top the seven-year warranty back up for these cars.

"With Motability we keep the share at 3.5%. It's mostly Ceed and Venga, but there is some Sportage too."

However, Cole believes the best inroads have been made in the user-chooser market.

"We're not big into solus deals, partly because until now we've not had the range," he said.

"Corporate sales [to user choosers] are doing very well. We're at 10,000 vehicles, double what we did last year. What works very well is Ceed SW and Sportage. Sportage gets us in [to a company fleet] and then the others sell."

Cole added: "The new Carens will be important for that too, but for a different audience."

He said the mini-MPV, set to rival the Ford C-max, would only be offered as a seven-seat version in the UK to keep the range simple and RVs strong. A five-seat version will be offered in other countries.

Meanwhile, Kia expects to hit 70,000 registrations next year, half of which will be to fleets, according to UK president Paul Philpott.

"Kia's growth in the past few years has been running around 20%, driven by product, but we can't maintain that next year, so we should see 5% to 10% growth next year," he said.

Philpott added that he expected this to still be ahead of the total market: "For 2013 we're with the SMMT in terms of predicting the total market. There will be possibly a 1% or 1.5% growth to reach maybe 1.9 million total."

However, he warned that pre-registrations were still a possibility.

"If other brands have got excess supply then they will shift the cars. The exchange rate means that the UK is attractive."

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