Kelley Blue Book Co. Inc., after about 90 years in business, is dipping its tires into international waters.
The Irvine-based car valuation firm last week announced it ventured into Portugal with www.kbb.pt, and plans to adapt its vehicle pricing and valuation website to “a few” additional countries per year.
“We are not disclosing different markets we’ll go to yet, [but we] have a pretty good appetite to take the brand around the world,” said Dan Ingle, vice president of international business development for Cox Automotive Media Group, part of Atlanta-based Cox Automotive Inc., which also owns AutoTrader.com, Dealertrack and other brands.
Kelley Blue Book partnered with technology company Janela Digital S.A. in Óbidos, Portugal, to develop the software platform, while vehicle pricing data comes from Auto SAPO in Lisbon.
“We quickly realized that Portugal wasn’t just a good market from a perspective of launching the brand” due to the relatively small market, “but it also has a pretty deep resource pool [of] technology people,” Ingle said. “One of the keys to this whole process is building this platform once, and then being able to replicate it around the world.”
The multi-currency, multi-language website went live on Feb. 1, providing trade-in, private party, used- and new car retail pricing. The customer feedback “has been very good.”
“We started driving a pretty good amount of traffic to the site relatively quickly,” Ingle said. “We are watching a lot of consumer behavior on the site to understand what they are doing, and we are finding that a large portion of them are going to multiple pages. That tells us they are going down the path and searching for that vehicle information they are looking for, price or editorial content, or comparing one vehicle to another—so far so good.”
Kelley Blue Book has set up an office in Lisbon and staffed it with a dozen people. The overall global expansion effort is still managed from Irvine.
Its U.S.-based website gets more than 20 million unique monthly visitors, but overseas shoppers aren’t familiar with the brand. Ingle said he’s not worried, though, as some consistencies prevail regardless of the marketplace.
“The No. 1 thing consumers are looking for online is the price—what they should be able to get for the car they own, or how much should they pay for a car they want to buy,” he said. “That’s a big part of what Kelley is trying to bring around the world, the process of transparency in the car shopping process.”
The company plans to market the website through other Cox Automotive businesses that operate in Portugal, including auto auction provider Manheim Inc., dealer software maker Incadea PLC, and Auto SAPO’s Venda Já. It’s also sponsoring a race team participating in the 2017 National Rally Championship Series.
The Portuguese website will be monetized in a similar way to its U.S. counterpart, including “more contextual and native advertising, things that don’t look like traditional banners and boxes on a website, and things that are more integrated with consumers’ shopping experience.”
Roots
The company and its iconic blue book were the brainchild of Les Kelley, a used car dealer—he started with Model Ts—who developed lists of vehicles that he wanted to buy, along with estimates of their fair market prices, and sent them to other dealers and banks to facilitate the effort. In 1926, he compiled the lists into an annual Blue Book of Motor Car Values.
The cars Kelley was selling were what he called “Selected Blue Seal Automobiles,” and he carried over the blue and gold ribbon medallion onto the book’s cover.
In 1962, he divested from dealerships to focus on publishing the book, which he sold to car dealers, financial institutions and insurance companies. The Kelley Blue Book was released as a consumer guide in 1993 and as a website in 1995.
Atlanta-based AutoTrader Group Inc. acquired the business in 2010 from a privately held trust for $532.4 million. Kelley Blue Book contributed $125.7 million, or about 13% of the company’s 2011 revenue, according to documents AutoTrader filed in 2012 as a part of an initial public offering that it later withdrew.
Privately held Cox Enterprises Inc. in Atlanta, which posted more than $20 billion in revenue and has about 60,000 employees, bought a 25% stake in AutoTrader in 2014 from Providence Equity Partners, bringing its ownership of the group to 98%. Eight months later, it formed Cox Automotive Inc. and folded under its banner some “20 leading wholesale and retail automotive brands,” including Kelley Blue Book, AutoTrader.com, Manheim, and NextGear Capital, a provider of auto financial services.
It also operates Cox Communications, a cable television distribution, high-speed Internet access, and telephone business, and Cox Media Group, which includes numerous television and radio stations, digital media, newspapers and advertising sales firms.
Big Picture
Kelley Blue Book’s next move may involve rebranding of its current overseas ventures.
Portugal is its first foray outside of the U.S. as a brand, although it has been in China since 2013 operating the JingZhenGu used vehicle valuation site via a joint venture with BitAuto and the Chinese Automobile Dealer Association.
Cox Automotive last year acquired Molicar, a Sao Paolo, Brazil-based vehicle valuation business. The addition gave it “valuation propositions in the world’s top three used vehicle markets,” Cox Automotive International President John Bailey said at the time. “This partnership represents a very exciting development that further enhances the range of products and services that Cox Automotive is able to offer to clients across the globe.”
Cox Automotive’s other recent international investments include Mahindra First Choice Wheels Ltd., a Mumbai-based used car company that also operates IndianBlueBook.com, “India’s most trusted vehicle pricing guide.”
“For China, there are no active plans to rebrand it Kelley Blue Book at this point,” Ingle said. “For Brazil, we are evaluating our approach around how to handle the Molicar brand. Molicar has good brand recognition within the industry side of the business—banks, insurance, dealer and OEM. For India, we only have a small equity stake, so we are not involved in the operations of the Indian Blue Book business, nor do we have any current plans to rebrand to Kelley Blue Book in that country.”
