Autovista began producing prices for used cars twenty years ago. With the Internet, the emphasis changed to data transfer between a portal and a dealership.

Finnish car sales became more centralized at the end of the 1990s, and the company started to provide tools for dealership management and administration. It is this know-how that Autovista is now exporting.

- We are gaining speed. New deals are happening and the situation evolves each month, says Mikael Teerilahti, the Managing Director of Autovista.

Beyond expectations

Currently, the main target of the company is the UK, where it made a contract with another chain just last week. Then the one million euros limit for import sales to the UK was broken.

The customers are leading operators in the field, the best of them sell 100 000 cars a year. Currently the company is negotiating on a partnership deal with a large sales organisation.

According to Teerilahti, the company’s success in the UK has been beyond all expectations.

- In Finland, the development and centralization of organisations in car sales has been quite exceptional. Large dealerships, such as Veho, Laakkonen or Metro-Auto, are nearly the size of large British chains. That is why the expertise gained in Finland is worth exporting to the UK, says Teerilahti.

Autovista has also exported its methods to Sweden and the Netherlands. The company has its own sales office in Belgium. It is perhaps the only company in the world to develop statistical models for car trade.

Correct Price for a Trade-in

Teerilahti says that the same kinds of models have been used in other branches, such as grocery trade, insurance business and energy sales.

- The search for efficiency in car sales is on. A central point in improving efficiency is chain management. When this is an everyday reasoning in other branches, why not in the automotive business as well.

Autovista specialises in processing information from the trade-in market. In their model, the purchases of used cars are done according to the purchase power of the entire chain, not just one dealership. With this model, purchased cars are transferred immediately to different dealerships according to demand.

- The single biggest problem in car sales is still the faulty appraisal of trade-in cars. Our model helps in determining a profitable price, explains Teerilahti.

He says that the markets for new cars are more developed in Finland and the UK than the Netherlands and Sweden. In the Netherlands the development is just taking place, but Sweden lags behind. In sales of used cars, chains are more common in the UK than elsewhere.

- In Finland, dealership chains still don’t pay enough attention to their trade-in business, so there is a need for mathematical models here as well, Teerilahti estimates.

At present, the company has a turnover of four million euros, which is believed to double in a year.