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"In each of our sites worldwide, Inchcape Advantage continues to drive all the performance management disciplines that are vital to the constant year on year improvement that we continue to deliver - unique insights into customer behaviour and trends, for example, that enable us to carry the optimum amount of the right stock at all times.

"Inchcape Advantage is a core enabler of our Customer 1st strategy.  First, to strengthen the performance of our existing assets by delivering a superior value proposition that helps us constantly to improve market share in both vehicle sales and aftersales.  And second, to help us seize expansion opportunities in the premium and luxury segments by leveraging our brand partner relationships based on outstanding service and satisfied customers," said Lacroix.

"Naturally, the implementation of this strategy is rigorously controlled. To do so, we use the strong operational discipline that results from our focus on what we call Inchcape's Top Five Priorities. We ensure that at all times we have a balanced focus between commercial and cash initiatives.

"Our two key commercial priorities are to increase market share and aftersales, enabling us to grow our revenues at a rate that is ahead of our competitors. Responsibility for these areas resides chiefly at a local level, where our empowered teams use innovative marketing to drive customers into our showrooms and service centres and once there, to delight them with an outstanding customer experience.

"And our three cash initiatives, which aim to grow our profit and operating cash faster than our revenue, are to improve our margins, to control our working capital and to be highly selective on our capital expenditure investments. Our Top Five Priorities are fully integrated in our Group-wide performance management processes.

"Our decentralised organisation plays an important role as our managers across the world have high levels of empowerment that they can wield at a local level. Under this model, a clear set of policies are provided centrally and implemented locally, in a way that takes advantage of high levels of local market understanding paired with our deep knowledge of our manufacturer partners' brands. Our glo-cal operating model provides global scale and local agility.

"Our glo-cal organisational model is enabled on a daily basis by one Group-wide focus on performance management with rigorous monitoring across a range of operational and customer metrics. This performance management discipline is deeply ingrained both centrally and locally, in breadth and in depth, and we consider this to be fundamental to the Group's operational efficiency.

"We drive performance management with industry leading processes. This gives us the opportunity to make well informed decisions quickly as we leverage both a comprehensive set of performance management processes and the accuracy of our performance management tools."