UK-based motor retail software specialist Pinewood is poised to scale rapidly, propelled by a series of major contract wins and completion of the rollout of its dealer management system (DMS) across Lithia’s UK network of 50 dealerships.
Lithia’s takeover of Pendragon dealerships and its deal with Pinewood led to some 2,500 Lithia staff in the UK joining Pinewood’s existing 30,000 user customer base, which includes former Pendragon staff.
But it also positioned Pinewood on an ambitious deployment trajectory supplying to Lithia’s 17,500 users globally – mostly in the United States. Success there will be critical to the business’ ambitious growth plans. The North America dealer software market is estimated to be worth more than an annual £2.6 billion and could help double Pinewood’s underlying 2022 profits to a targeted £27 million by 2027.
A year later it secured another significant win, when the business landed a five-year contract with Lookers’ owner Global Auto Holdings to implement its platform across its entire dealership network in the UK, North America and Scandinavia.
With over 155 franchised dealership sites and an extensive new car distribution division, Global Auto represents the largest non-affiliated dealership group to adopt Pinewood’s platform to date.
Now free of the Pendragon reins, which previous bosses suspected as a barrier for its broader adoption among other major dealer groups, given that many of those groups saw Pendragon as a major rival, Pinewood proudly noted that it now supplies its services to five of the top 20 in the AM100, including Lookers, Lithia and Marshall Motor Group.
In the UK it wants to close the gap to market leader Keyloop.
The UK rollout with Lithia, according to Pinewood chief executive Bill Berman and CFO Ollie Mann, has provided valuable learnings that will shape Pinewood’s expansion across the Atlantic. By the end of 2026 Berman expects its software to be probably in 1,600 to 1,700 dealerships.
In a call with Automotive Management he credited the success of the Lithia UK deployment essentially to developing a collaborative approach: “They were part of the decision and were intricately involved in it and incredibly supportive of it.”
Pinewood now aims to replicate this model in North America, where interest is already building, although it is a market dominated by a handful of entrenched providers.
“With those providers, if you want to have a used vehicle management tool, you have to write an API but those can be quite complicated. They’re clunky whereas our product is a seamless ecosystem, a platform that facilitates virtually the entire customer journey in sales or service,” Berman says. He claims Pinewood’s integrated approach reduces cost and increases efficiency, and adds: “Those older tech stacks simply can’t do what we do.”
The Global Auto contract signed in February puts Pinewood’s technology into the Lookers dealerships in the UK and Global’s 16 large sites in North America, whose scale Berman equates to 35 to 50 UK dealerships.
It is Pinewood’s largest-ever agreement and an entry into new markets – Global also owns eight dealerships in Denmark. Pinewood is also eyeing a further opportunity through Global’s licensed car importer KW Bruun, which has the new car and parts distribution rights for Stellantis brands there and oversees 200 more outlets.
“If we’re able to get all of that… that’d be the largest store group we have in the world,” he says. “It’s a huge opportunity.”
“If you get into Denmark that opens up Finland and Norway and the Netherlands,” Berman notes. “It starts to kind of a domino cascading effect for opportunities.”
In terms of product developments, its recent acquisition of Seez is central to Pinewood’s push into AI and automation. The company’s chatbot technology is already being rolled out across Lithia’s UK and US stores. But the bigger play is full integration.
“We’re built on modern tech, and we have an incredibly pure and valuable data stack,” said Berman “We could use a bot to do a full end-to-end sales transaction… whether that’s a buy a PCP on a new or used car with or without a sales associate at any hour of the day.”
There’s also a long-term vision to enhance aftersales operations with AI to start to create predictive indexes on when and what services they’re going to need. As Berman points out, “Nobody is going down this pathway.”
To fully harness Seez, Pinewood is also rolling out a new user experience platform. “We’re in a couple of dozen stores right now,” Berman says, adding that global deployment here will complete this year.
On the prospect of future M&A activity, Berman notes potential for deals around finance and insurance or acquiring a smaller DMS to fast-track entry into a new region could be attractive.
As Berman puts it: “We definitely have one of the market-leading products to bring in to the market, plus we have a great partner with Lithia.”