ALMOST a thousand jobs could be on the chopping block as a UK-wide car dealership is sold in a half-a-billion-pound deal.
Lookers, the car dealership company with 138 sites from Kent to Scotland, has been taken over by Canada’s Alpha Auto Group in a £504million deal.
AlamyLookers has been sold to a Canadian auto giant[/caption]
According to reporting by Reuters, 945 jobs could be cut in a restructure, but that figure is yet to be confirmed.
The jobs would be cut in the operations side of the business, where the company also offers car servicing and MOTs.
The buyer, a bidding entity of Canada’s Alpha Auto Group, raised its offer for the Manchester-based dealership in the summer after Lookers’ biggest shareholder pulled out.
Alpha Auto and its private owner have more than 160 dealership groups around the world.
Lookers would be privately owned and thus taken off the London Stock Exchange, where it has been publicly listed for 50 years.
A spokesperson for Lookers said that earlier in December the company had confirmed that a number of corporate and service roles would also be affected.
Their statement read: “We have now completed a detailed review of our business and operations to keep the business efficient and ensure we have a manageable cost base.
“Unfortunately, a number of roles have been identified across our operations that are now at risk of redundancy.”
Lookers did not confirm the number of roles set to be affected by the redundancies.
The dealership had been struggling financially before the pandemic hit, with the lockdowns only making sales worse.
Lookers was founded in 1908 as a bicycle seller and eventually switched to cars.
By the 1960s, it was one of the leading chains, alongside Pendragon, Inchcape and Marshall.
It was slapped with a £4million charge in 2020 in relation to fraud but said it would remain profitable.
All dealerships were ordered by the Government to temporarily shut on March 26, alongside other non-essential retailers, to help stop the spread of coronavirus.
Lookers’ financial situation was hit by Covid closing its doorsPA