The Thought Leadership Feature Panel is pitched as one of the key events of the Convention which will be held on June 14-15 at the ICC in Sydney.

AADA CEO James Voortman will moderate the panel of industry leaders, including:

• Matt Callachor – CEO & president of Toyota Australia, the nation’s auto market sales leader 
• Cameron McIntyre, CEO & managing director of Carsales.com.au, Australia’s #1 auto marketplace 
• Geoffrey Pohanka – 2023 chairman of the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) whose family has operated dealerships for more than 100 years
• Stephen Lester – CEO of leading automotive services group, Cox Automotive Australia
• Nick Pappas – CEO of leading Australian dealer group, Servco

Mr Voortman told GoAutoNews Premium: “There has been a lot of change in the industry in the last few years. Only over the past three or four years, we have gone from being incredibly over supplied to a market that’s chronically under-supplied.

James Voortman

“You then look at the EV numbers, which have risen very quickly to the extent where they’re now 7 per cent of new cars in April. Chinese brands are around 15 per cent of new cars sold through hundreds of dealerships.  Chery is just getting started with other new entrants like Cupra and Grenadier. 

“So a lot of changes and also a lot of risks that have emerged over the last few years, I guess the biggest one being cyber security and the need to protect that customer data. 

“What we are just trying to do at this event is review all this change and see what it means for automotive retail.

“We still cannot imagine an industry in which the dealer network ceases to play an important role. We just believe the scale of the operations and the way it reaches every corner of Australia is so important. So we’re not questioning whether there will be a dealer network. We’re just looking at how it will operate and what will be different in the future, given all of these trends that are coming at us.

“And I think the people we have on the panel are a really good mixture. We have Geoffrey Pohanka, an overseas dealer who’s been going for 100 years and heads NADA. We have Nick Pappas, who’s in charge of a relatively large dealer network here with Servco. And then Matt Callachor with Toyota needs no introduction and Stephen Lester, who has that OEM experience but he’s now with Cox. So he brings a different perspective and then Cameron McIntyre with Carsales.. 

“So we have the right people to talk about what this industry is going to look like in the future.”

Stephen Lester

Mr Voortman said in a statement: “The Convention and Expo is the key event on the calendar of an industry in which its car dealerships engage with millions of automotive customers, complete millions of car services, repairs and recall jobs and facilitate over 300,000 finance contracts for vehicle purchases. 

“The industry segment directly employs 60,000 Australians and contributes $13 billion to the national economy. 

“New car dealerships are the foundation of the automotive ecosystem and the 2023 AADA Convention & Expo will explore what the road ahead looks like for retail auto and especially look at how new car dealerships will lead the way in innovation and consumer interaction.

“The arrival of new car brands, the growth of low and zero emission vehicles, the emergence of subscription models, big data and changes to vehicle distribution are some of the trends driving change in our industry,” Mr Voortman said.

The director of the convention, Patrick Tessier, told GoAutoNews Premium that the Expo display areas were booked out by January and that dealer registrations were “very solid” for this year’s event.

“As of today, we are 121 registrations ahead of where we were the same number of days out from this time last year.  We had 959 attendees on the ground last year. So I’m confidently expecting more than 1000 people,” he said.

“Dealer interest is really quite strong, but the thing that has stood out to me this year is dealer groups. We’ve had a lot of group bookings where a dealership group has four or five dealerships and they have brought all their DPs; five or 10 or whatever it may be. The dealer groups have really been quite strong.

“There are two key messages for us: disruption and innovation. 

“The OEMs are trying to disrupt the model they need but against this no one I think can imagine a footprint in our market without a dealership.  We’ve been here a number of times before, and it comes down to the fact that it does not seem possible to have a car industry without car dealerships,” he said.

By John Mellor