Auto Trader Group plc, commonly known as Auto Trader, is a British automotive online marketplace and classified advertising business. It enables the buying and selling of new and used vehicles by private sellers and trade retailers. Auto Trader is listed on the London Stock Exchange trading under the ticker symbol AUTO, and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
History
Early history: twentieth century
Auto Trader was founded in 1975 by English businessman and car aficionado John Madejski.
Whilst on holiday in Florida, Madejski had seen a car sales magazine that included pictures of the vehicles on sale. Realising the potential of the idea, together with his business partners Paul Gibbons and Peter Taylor he founded Thames Valley Trader in 1977.
Initially, the magazine advertised anything and everything, from houses to cars and even aircraft, but it soon narrowed its focus to vehicles and was rebranded Auto Trader in 1988. The first title was followed by the publication of a second one, Southern Auto Trader.
The company launched a website, Autotrader.co.uk, in 1996, giving people the ability to buy or sell a car online. Consumers could search for cars and other vehicles using their postcode. Autotrader.co.uk quickly became the most popular automotive website in the United Kingdom, by 2009 attracting 10.3 million unique users per month, on average.
British international investment firm BC Partners bought a stake in the business from John Madejski in July 1998 for £260m; then Guardian Media Group, who had acquired Automart in 1982, merged that business with Hurst Publishing in May 2000 so creating Trader Media.
21st century and evolution to digital only
Auto Trader launched a mobile website in 2002, initially using the WAP protocol.
In July 2008, Auto Trader launched a .mobi site, and in July 2009, separate versions for differing handset capability levels were released.
Auto Trader developed its mobile offering further from March 2010, releasing applications enabling users to search for vehicles on iOS, Android and Windows Mobile devices using augmented reality features.
In April 2011 a group called the Motor Traders Advertising Union launched an online petition and proposed a mass pull out by auto dealers who objected to an increase in the fee for a dealership to advertise a car, from £7 to £8.50, before any discounts for bulk advertisers.
Sales of the print magazine dwindled in line with the decline of the print industry. By July 2012, circulation had dropped to an average of 87,000 copies a week and down to 27,000 in March 2013.
In June 2013, after thirty six years, the final editions of the printed magazine were published, with the company concentrating on its online business.
In October 2013, AutoTrader.co.za (Auto Trader South Africa) a subsidiary of the Auto Trader Group, was sold off to become an independent South African company.
In January 2014, Apax Partners bought the business from Guardian Media Group for £600m.
In March 2014, the company rebranded, and became known as Auto Trader, and in March 2015, Auto Trader Group launched an initial public offering, with a market capitalisation of about £2bn and floated on the London Stock Exchange on the FTSE250.
In 2020 it was reported that Auto Trader had created a data lake and intelligence platform using services including Amazon Web Services and Google's Looker, and was working to foster a ‘culture of data’ internally by setting up a data academy for employees.
Auto Trader launched a product called Retailer Stores in April 2021, which offers retailers their own customisable destination within the marketplace, and a product called Instant Cash Offer in August 2021, which provides consumers with an alternative to selling privately, with a ‘no-haggle’ cash price for their vehicle, free collection from their home, with no administration fees and immediate payment as soon as the offer is accepted.
Auto Trader granted four months of free advertising to its retailer customers to support them during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2022, Auto Trader began a partnership with the Office for National Statistics sharing its used car pricing data to power its official measures of inflation, including the Consumer Prices Index.
Also in 2022, Auto Trader acquired Autorama, owner of Vanarama, one of the UK’s largest transactional marketplaces for leasing new vehicles.