The car market collapse, warranty hysteria and supply issues after Japan’s tsunami were a triple whammy for RRG Group in the North West of England. Yet it made it through intact, and bounced back fast. Now its Japanese owners have given its management clear instructions: acquire, expand and spread the risk.

RRG Group has caused some frustration for AM in previous years. It has long been a very strong regional performer, quietly making money and serving its carmaker partners well. But despite a couple of approaches by AM for interviews over the years, the top 30 AM100 dealer group remained rather media shy.

But this time AM hit gold, with appointments with joint managing directors Arran Bangham and Tony Cliff. So the obvious first question was what has changed?

Bangham was candid – it’s time to raise the group’s profile in the industry. The reason? “We’ve been tasked by our team in Tokyo at Marubeni Corporation to double the size of the business, the entire business, by 2015,” he said.

That is some step change in RRG’s development, whose last acquisition was Smith Knight Fay’s Japanese brand division in 2006. UK motor retail still represents a tiny proportion of parent Marubeni’s global business interests, even after its 2008 acquisition of Norton Way Motors 200 miles further south in Hertfordshire. RRG Group and Norton Way continue to operate independently, though they share a Japanese chairman and are grouped together in the AM100, AM’s annual ranking of the UK’s largest motor retailers.