KAR Auction Services has been expanding beyond auctions and outside North America, so the company has rebranded itself as KAR Global.
This story by David Muller appeared in Automotive News.
Discussions of rebranding began about three years ago, CEO Jim Hallett said.
“As we thought about it, we wanted a name that would better describe who we are,” Hallett said. “We’re a global company. We have global products. We have global customers, and global customers want to do business with global companies.”
KAR, of Carmel, Ind., has more than 200 locations in 10 countries and customers in more than 75 countries.
An inflection point in the company’s evolution beyond KAR Auction Services came with the acquisition of online auction company Openlane in 2011, Hallett said.
“We went from being a brick-and-mortar auction business with a few ancillary services to being the leading online player in the industry,” he said.
KAR has made several other major, digital-related acquisitions in the years since. In 2017, it acquired full interest in mobile wholesaling platform TradeRev, after buying a 50 percent stake in the company in 2014. Also in 2017, it acquired Drivin, a data analytics firm that aggregates automotive retail, pricing, registration and other market and economic information. In early 2018, it bought fleet management software company Stratim.
This year, it expanded outside North America with the acquisition of Belgian online auction company CarsOnTheWeb, which it has rebranded as ADESA Europe. Before that deal, KAR’s European presence was limited to the United Kingdom, with its ADESA UK business unit. With the purchase, KAR gained a foothold across much of Europe, with sales operations in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, and connected sellers in those countries with buyers in 50 European countries. The company’s online and mobile tools are available in 19 languages.
